ill-mannered minds, Gifted and glassy with exact recall

And when your beauty, washed away 

In impure streams with my desire, 

Is only topic for ill-mannered minds, 

Gifted and glassy with exact recall, 

Gossip and rancid footnotes, or remote despair, 

Let ruined weather perish in the streets 

And let the world's black lying flag come down. 

 

Only in calendars that mark no Spring 

Can there be weather in the mind 

That moves to you again as you are now: 

Tired after love and silent in this house, 

Your back turned to me, quite alone, 

Standing with one hand raised to smooth your hair, 

At a small window, green with rain. 

 

[Weldon Kees {1914- (disappeared and presumed dead) 1955}, from 'Eight Variations', in The open door: one hundred poems, one hundred years of Poetry magazine]