© g. Paul Bishop 1965

WILLIAM OLIVER EVERSON
Pen Name: BROTHER ANTONIUS
Poet

1912-1994

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Selected Poems

from

MODERN POEMS
An Introduction to Poetry

edited by

Richard Ellmann & Robert O'Clair

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Years End

The year dies fiercely: out of the north the beating storms,
And wind at the roof's edge, lightning swording the low sky:
This year dying like some traitored Norse stumbling under the deep
    wounds,
The furious steel, smashing and swinging.

From the northern room I watch in the dusk,                                         5
And being unsocial regard the coming year coldly,
Suspicious of strangers, distrustful of innovations,
Reluctant to chance one way or another the unknown.
I leave this year as a man leaves wine.
Remembering the summer, bountiful, the good fall, the months mellow
    and full.                                                                                    10
I sit in the northern room, in the dusk, the death of a year,
And watch it go down in thunder.

                                                                              1948

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The Raid

They came out of the sun undetected,
Who had lain in the thin ships
All night long on the cold ocean,
Watched Vega down, the Wain hover,¹
Drank in the weakening dawn their brew,                              5
And sent the lumbering death-laden birds
Level along the decks.

They came out of the sun with their guns geared,
Saw the soft and easy shape of that island
Laid on the sea,                                                             10
An unwakening woman.
Its deep hollows and its flowing folds
Veiled in the garlands of its morning mists.
Each of them held in his aching eyes the erotic image,
And then tipped down,                                                     15
In the target's trance,
In the ageless instant of the long descent,
And saw sweet chaos blossom below,
And felt in that flower the years release.

The perfect achievement.                                                20
They went back toward the sun crazy with joy,
Like wild birds weaving,
Drunkenly stunting;
Passed out over edge of that injured island,
Sought the rendezvous on the open sea                             25
Where the ships would be waiting.

None were there.
Neither smoke nor smudge;
Neither spar nor splice nor rolling raft.
Only the wide waiting waste,                                            30
That each of them saw with intenser sight
Than he ever had spared it,
Who circled that spot,
The spent gauge caught in its final flutter,
And straggled down on their wavering wings                        35
From the vast sky,
From the endless spaces,
Down at last for the low hover,
And the short quick quench of the sea.

                                                                 1948

    ^1. The former is a star, and the latter a constellation, visible in the northern hemisphere.

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