NOW shall I walk
Or shall I ride?
"Ride", Pleasure said;
"Walk", Joy replied.
Now what shall I --
Stay home or roam?
"Roam", Pleasure said;
And Joy -- "stay home."
Now shall I dance,
Or sit for dreams?
"Sit," answers Joy;
"Dance," Pleasure screams.
Which of ye two
Will kindest be?
Pleasure laughed sweet,
But Joy kissed me.
W.H. Davies, The Best Friend
Two roads diverged in a
yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.
Robert Frost, from Two Roads
We shall not cease from
exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive at where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot, from Little Gidding
What is
Art? Here is my answer;
Leg of tramp, and toe of dancer.
Alfred Barron
To walk abroad is, not with eyes,
But thoughts, the fields to see and prize;
Else may the silent feet,
Like logs of wood,
Move up and down, and see no good,
Nor joy nor glory meet.
Thomas Traherne, from Walking
Legs hold a
torso away from the earth.
And a regular high poem of legs is here.
Powers of bone and cord raise a belly and lungs
Out of ooze and over the loam where eyes look and ears hear
And arms have a chance to hammer and shoot and run motors.
You make us
Proud of our legs, old man.
And you
left off the head here,
The skull found always crumbling neighbor of the ankles
Carl Sandburg, The Walking Man of
Rodin
A moose
walks into the living room, and stands among my family drinking cocktails. We put down our glasses. This is why the vines have been coming in the
kitchen windows, why last week the bathroom ceiling fell in. Brother
gets into the car, then mother, father; with only a suitcase full of ribbons
I am ready to go. The moose can have the house now. My foot is
on fire, and the moon is in the backyard singing. Get up from the
poem. Get up before it's too late, walk with your lamp off through the
fields of the first light, to where the birds sing in the dark, and the dew
is on the grass.
Jay Leeming,
Exit, with Moose
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