one comes to language from afar, the ear
fears for its sound-barriers —
but one “comes”; the language “comes” for
The Beckoning Fair One
plant you now, dig you
later, the plaint stirs winter
earth…
air in a hornet’ s nest
over the water makes a
solid, six-sided music…
a few utterly quiet scenes, things
are very far away — “form
is emptiness”
comely, comely, love trembles
and the sweet-shrub
John Gordon Boyd
died on the birthday
of three remarkable, and remarkably different, writers:
Heinrich Heine, Kenneth Patchen, Ross McDonald
John, too, was just as remarkable, blessed with an inherent “graciousness”
and with extraordinary eyes & ears…
I think of two texts
on the grievous occasion of his death:
“Religion does not help me.
The faith that others give to what is unseen,
I give to what I can touch, and look at.
My Gods dwell in temples
made with hands.”
— Oscar Wilde, in De Profundis
where the car hit him, fireweed sprang with
blazons of fennel
and umbels
of dill fell
through the spokes of a wheel
on Whistun holiday to the sun, Denton
Welch spun a web in his crushed cycle,
sat in the seat, spine curled up like a spider —
and spied: “saw
the very drops of sweat glittering frostily
between the shoulder blades”
of a lad
I. “If the Night Could Get Up & Walk”
I cannot put my hand into
a cabbage to turn
on the light, but
the moon moves over
the field of dark cabbage and an
exchange fills
all veins.
The cabbage is also a globe
of light, the two globes
