Nate Fillmore email: nate at the present domain academic: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~nathanae/

Current Activities.

Poems I like.

She kept her songs, they took so little space,
   The covers pleased her: 
One bleached from lying in a sunny place, 
One marked in circles by a vase of water, 
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her, 
   And coloured, by her daughter —
So they had waited, till, in widowhood 
She found them, looking for something else, and stood 

Relearning how each frank submissive chord 
   Had ushered in 
Word after sprawling hyphenated word, 
And the unfailing sense of being young 
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein 
   That hidden freshness sung, 
That certainty of time laid up in store 
As when she played them first. But, even more, 

The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love, 
   Broke out, to show 
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy, 
And set unchangeably in order. So 
   To pile them back, to cry, 
Was hard, without lamely admitting how 
It had not done so then, and could not now. 

-- Philip Larkin


ADMONITIONS TO A SPECIAL PERSON

Watch out for friends,
because when you betray them,
as you will,
they will bury their heads in the toilet
and flush themselves away.

Watch out for love
(unless it is true,
and every part of you says yes including the toes),
it will wrap you up like a mummy,
and your scream won't be heard
and none of your running will end.

Special person,
if I were you I'd pay no attention
to admonitions from me,
made somewhat out of your words
and somewhat out of mine.

I do not believe a word I have said,
except some, except I think of you like a young tree
with pasted-on leaves and know you'll root
and the real green thing will come.

-- Anne Sexton*


I can't go into the meaning of the dream
except to say a sense of total loss
afflicted me thereof:
an absolute disappearance of continuity & love
and children away at school, the weight of the cross,
and everything is what it seems. 

-- John Berryman*


Die Einsamkeit ist wie ein Regen.
Sie steigt vom Meer den Abenden entgegen;
von Ebenen, die fern sind und entlegen,
geht sie zum Himmel, der sie immer hat.
Und erst vom Himmel fält sie auf die Stadt.

Regnet hernieder in den Zwitterstunden,
wenn sich nach Morgen wenden alle Gassen
und wenn die Leiber, welche nichts gefunden,
enttäuscht und traurig von einander lassen;
und wenn die Menschen, die einander hassen,
in einem Bett zusammen schlafen müssen: 

dann geht die Einsamkeit mit den Flüsen... 

-- Rilke


THE SICK ROSE
O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy. 

-- Blake


We have two wooded acres there, very narrow, with waterfront. Dad
built himself a small "shack" as he called it to be as far away from
the family noise as possible. That way he could work to his heart's
content and not interfere with the noisy comings and goings of the
likes of my brother and me and our friends. It was not wired for
electricity, so when it was late or dark or stormy, he would light
his kerosene lanterns and keep pounding away on his typewriter. Daddy
would surface when he wanted company or diversion, have a swim and
sail in the late afternoon. Or he might climb into his canoe with a
handful of reprints, and paddle upwind on our small lake. He would
sit down in the bottom of the canoe, get out his reading, and just
coast as far as he could until it became necessary to disengage
himself from lily pads or someone's mooring.

-- Quine's daughter



* Edited

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