Lately, I can't get enough of this poem (or Tennessee Williams, generally). Perhaps because it's evocative of one of my best-loved words, calenture: " A name formerly given to various fevers occurring in tropics; esp. to a form of furious delirium accompanied by fever, among sailors, which sometimes led the affected person to imagine the sea to be a green field, and to throw himself into it." I like the topsy-turvy nature of this poem in that way, very much.
From New Directions' primo new Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams, which I could read all day and night and sometimes do!
CLOVER
BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
These are fragrant acres where
Evening comes long hours late
And the still unmoving air
Cools the fevered hands of Fate.
Meadows where the afternoon
Hangs suspended in a flower
And the moments of our doom
Drift upon a weightless hour.
And we who thought that surely night
Would bring us triumph or defeat
Only find that stars are white
Clover at our naked feet.
Image: John Singer Sargent, Sailors on Deck of Ship (from Scrapbook).
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