Two Poems by Kenneth Rexroth

The Bad Old Days

The summer of nineteen eighteen   

I read The Jungle and The

Research Magnificent. That fall   

My father died and my aunt   

Took me to Chicago to live.   

The first thing I did was to take   

A streetcar to the stockyards.   

In the winter afternoon,   

Gritty and fetid, I walked

Through the filthy snow, through the   

Squalid streets, looking shyly   

Into the people’s faces,

Those who were home in the daytime.   

Debauched and exhausted faces,   

Starved and looted brains, faces   

Like the faces in the senile   

And insane wards of charity   

Hospitals. Predatory

Faces of little children.

Then as the soiled twilight darkened,   

Under the green gas lamps, and the   

Sputtering purple arc lamps,   

The faces of the men coming

Home from work, some still alive with   

The last pulse of hope or courage,   

Some sly and bitter, some smart and   

Silly, most of them already   

Broken and empty, no life,   

Only blinding tiredness, worse   

Than any tired animal.   

The sour smells of a thousand   

Suppers of fried potatoes and   

Fried cabbage bled into the street.   

I was giddy and sick, and out   

Of my misery I felt rising   

A terrible anger and out

Of the anger, an absolute vow.   

Today the evil is clean

And prosperous, but it is   

Everywhere, you don’t have to   

Take a streetcar to find it,

And it is the same evil.

And the misery, and the

Anger, and the vow are the same.

Kings River Canyon

My sorrow is so wide

I cannot see across it;

And so deep I shall never

Reach the bottom of it.

The moon sinks through deep haze,

As though the Kings River Canyon

Were filled with fine, warm, damp gauze.

Saturn gleams through the thick light

Like a gold, wet eye; nearby

Antares glows faintly,

Without sparkle. Far overhead,

Stone shines darkly in the moonlight—

Lookout point, where we lay

In another full moon, and first

Peered down into this canyon.

Here we camped, by still autumnal 

Pools, all one warm October.

I baked you a bannock birthday cake.

Here you did your best paintings—

Innocent, wondering landscapes.

Very few of them are left

Anywhere. You destroyed them 

In the terrible trouble

Of your long sickness. Eighteen years

Have passed since that autumn.

There was no trail here then.

Only a few people knew 

How to enter this canyon.

We were all alone, twenty

Miles from anybody,

A young husband and wife,

Closed in and wrapped about

In the quiet autumn,

In the sound of quiet water,

In the turning and falling leaves,

In the wavering of innumerable

Bats from the caves, dipping

Over the odorous pools

Where the great trout 
drowsed in the evenings.

Eighteen years have been ground

To pieces in the wheels of life.

You are dead. With a thousand

Convicts they have blown a highway

Through Horseshoe Bend. Youth is gone,

That only came once. My hair

Is turning grey and my body

Heavier. I too move on to death.

I think of Henry King's stilted

But desolate Exequy,

Of Yuan Chen's great poem,

Unbearably pitiful;

Alone by the Spring river

More alone than I had ever

Imagined I would ever be,

I think of Frieda Lawrence,

Sitting alone in New Mexico,

In the long drought, listening

For the hiss of the milky Isar,

Over the cobbles, in a lost Spring.

Kenneth Rexroth had published numerous books of poetry, among them are In What Hour, Macmillan, 1940; The Phoenix and the Tortoise, New Directions, 1944; The Art of Worldly Wisdom, Decker Press, 1949; Thou Shalt Not Kill, Good Press, 1955; In Defense of the Earth, New Directions, 1956; Natural Numbers: New and Selected Poems, New Directions, 1963; Collected Longer Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, New Directions, 1968; Sky Sea Birds Tree Earth House Beasts Flowers, Unicorn Press, 1971; New Poems, New Directions, 1974; (posthumously): Selected Poems, New Directions, 1984; Flower Wreath Hill: Later Poems, New Directions, 1991; Sacramental Acts: The Love Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, Copper Canyon Press, 1997; The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, Copper Canyon Press, 2003.

His poems had been published in many periodicals such as Poetry, New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Hudson Review, Parnassus, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harper's, Prairie Schooner, Washington Post, and many others. 

Kenneth Rexroth (December 22, 1905 – June 6, 1982)