Old man in the crystal morning after snow,
Your throat swathed in a muffler, your bent
Figure building the snow man which is meant
For the grandchild's target,
do you know
This fat cartoon, his eyes pocked in with coal
Nears you each time your breath smokes the air,
Lewdly grinning out of a private nightmare?
He is the white cold shadow of your soul.
You build his comic head, you place his comic hat;
Old age is not so serious, and I
By the window sad and watchful as a cat,
Build to this poem of old age and of snow,
And weep: you are my snow man and I know
I near you, you near him, all of us must die.
(C) Delmore Schwartz
03/24/2017
Best Poems of Delmore Schwartz
- A Dream Of Whitman Paraphrased, Recognized And Made More Vivid By Renoir
- Prothalamion
- Poem (you, My Photographer, You, Most Aware)
- Saint, Revolutionist
- The Greatest Thing In North America
- The Journey Of A Poem Compared To All The Sad Variety Of Travel
- Philology Recapitulates Ontology, Poetry Is Ontology
- The Poet
- Out Of The Watercolored Window, When You Look
- This Is A Poem I Wrote At Night, Before The Dawn
- America, America!
- The Ballad Of The Children Of The Czar
- Albert Einstein To Archibald Macleish
- A Young Child And His Pregnant Mother
- For The One Who Would Not Take His Life In His Hands
- Faust In Old Age
- Far Rockaway
- Concerning The Synthetic Unity Of Apperception
- Baudelaire
- Archaic Bust Of Apollo
- Apollo Musagete, Poetry, And The Leader Of The Muses