Academy of American Poets
View Cart | Log In 
Subscribe | More Info 
Find a Poet or Poem
Advanced Search >
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hayden Carruth
Hayden Carruth
Hayden Carruth was born on August 3, 1921, in Waterbury, Connecticut, and...
More >
Want more poems?
Subscribe to our
Poem-A-Day emails.
FURTHER READING
Poems about Poetry
Epistles, Book II, Ars Poetica
by Horace
Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames]
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
A Book Of Music
by Jack Spicer
A True Poem
by Lloyd Schwartz
Adam's Curse
by W. B. Yeats, read by James Wright
Always on the Train
by Ruth Stone
Ars Poetica
by Archibald MacLeish
Ars Poetica (cocoons)
by Dana Levin
Arthur's Anthology of English Poetry
by Laurence Lerner
Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
by Howard Nemerov
Blue or Green
by James Galvin
Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks
by Jane Kenyon
Broadway
by Mark Doty
Diving into the Wreck
by Adrienne Rich, read by Anne Waldman
Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand
Envoi
by William Meredith
Ground Swell
by Mark Jarman
How to Read a Poem: Beginner's Manual
by Pamela Spiro Wagner
If It All Went Up in Smoke
by George Oppen
Languages
by Carl Sandburg
O Black and Unknown Bards
by James Weldon Johnson
Poet's Work
by Lorine Niedecker
Poetry
by Marianne Moore
Poetry Is a Destructive Force
by Wallace Stevens
Prefix: Finding the measure
by Robert Kelly
Speech Alone
by Jean Follain
Take the I Out
by Sharon Olds
Teaching the Ape to Write Poems
by James Tate
The Art of Poetry [excerpt]
by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
The Bear
by Galway Kinnell
The Composition of the Text
by Adriano Spatola
The Difference between a Child and a Poem
by Michael Blumenthal
The Indications [excerpt]
by Walt Whitman
The Poem as Mask
by Muriel Rukeyser
The Poems I Have Not Written
by John Brehm
The Uses of Poetry
by William Carlos Williams
This Bridge, Like Poetry, is Vertigo
by Marie Ponsot
What He Thought
by Heather McHugh
Why I Am Not a Painter
by Frank O'Hara
Workshop
by Billy Collins
Sponsor a Poet Page | Add to Notebook | Email to Friend | Print

Endnote

 
by Hayden Carruth

The great poems of
our elders in many
tongues we struggled

to comprehend who
are now content with
mystery simple

and profound you
in the night your
breath your body

orbit of time and
the moment you
Phosphorus and

Hesper a dark circle
of fertility so
bloodthirsty for us

you in the world
the night breathing 
asleep and alive. 






From Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, Poems 1991-1995, published by Copper Canyon Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Hayden Carruth. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368.
Larger TypeLarger Type | Home | Help | Contact Us | Privacy Policy Copyright © 1997 - 2013 by Academy of American Poets.