All Request: Winter Poetry

This isn't particularly wintry, but here are two poems I was just reading.  The first I found in one of my old journals (fall of 2000), scrawled in the journal with no commentary about where I found it, or what I think it means: 

You Want a Social Life, With Friends

You want a social life, with friends,
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day.  What's true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn't time enough, my friends --
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends --
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the ceiling
But did he go to parties at day's end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.

-- Kenneth Koch.

The other poem I read recently is scrawled in another journal. 

I know this because I remember it, not because I have recently seen the journal.  I can't recall right now even what year or which journal I might have copied it into.  It was long ago, I know.  I ran across the poem a few nights ago while I was reading Good Poems, an anthology selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor, and remembered once (when?)  falling in love with the poem and copying it into a journal.   Around the same time I vaguely remember that I also copied into my journal another poem that I can't really remember, about a couple walking in the fall, and their love has ended, and a rabbit hops across the road.  It was sad.... If I find it, I'll include it. 

He Wishes For the Cloths Of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

-- W.B. Yeats

Comments

[B]

thanks for that great poem. I have the same book and it escaped me! I am now wondering what other little jewels I passed up. I am surprised how good that poetry book is. I thought it was going to be "lite" but it is a great compelation.