April is National Poetry Month! Robinson Jeffers: "De rerum virtute"

When I left at 5pm to work on a project with a partner, I had no idea it'd end up taking eight hours...


Robinson Jeffers, "De rerum virtute" (excerpt).


Here is the skull of a man: a man's thoughts and emotions
Have moved under the thin bone vault like clouds
Under the blue one: love and desire and pain,
Thunderclouds of wrath and white gales of fear
Have hung inside here: and sometimes the curious desire of knowing
Values and purposes of things
Has coasted like a little observer air-plane over the images
That filled this mind: it never discovered much,
And now all's empty, a bone bubble, a blown-out eggshell.