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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frederick Seidel
Frederick Seidel
The author of numerous collections, Seidel's brutal and fearless work is frequently described in terms that are simultaneously praise and censure, depending on perspective...
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FURTHER READING
Other Odes
Age
by Robert Creeley
America
by Robert Creeley
America
by Herman Melville
Flying Fish: An Ode [excerpt]
by Charles Wharton Stork
Ode on Dictionaries
by Barbara Hamby
Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
by William Wordsworth
Ode on My Episiotomy
by Kimberly Johnson
Ode on Periods
by Bernadette Mayer
Ode to a Nightingale
by John Keats
Ode to the Confederate Dead
by Allen Tate
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket
by Robert Lowell
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Ode to Spring  
by Frederick Seidel

I can only find words for.
And sometimes I can't.
Here are these flowers that stand for.
I stand here on the sidewalk.

I can't stand it, but yes of course I understand it.
Everything has to have meaning.
Things have to stand for something.
I can't take the time. Even skin-deep is too deep.

I say to the flower stand man:
Beautiful flowers at your flower stand, man.
I'll take a dozen of the lilies.
I'm standing as it were on my knees

Before a little man up on a raised 
Runway altar where his flowers are arrayed
Along the outside of the shop.
I take my flames and pay inside.

I go off and have sexual intercourse.
The woman is the woman I love.
The room displays thirteen lilies.
I stand on the surface.



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From Poems 1959-2009 by Frederick Seidel. Copyright © 2009 by Frederick Seidel. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved.
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