A kiss on the forehead — erases misery.
I kiss your forehead.
A kiss on the eyes — lifts sleeplessness.
I kiss your eyes.
A kiss on the lips — is a drink of water.
I kiss your lips.
A kiss on the forehead — erases memory.
1917
Orange peels, burned letters, the car lights shining on the grass,
everything goes somewhereand everything we donothing
ever disappears. But changes. The roar of the sun in photographs.
Inching shorelines. Ice lines. The cells of our skin; our meetings,
our solitudes. Our eyes.
Ah Margarida,
If I gave you my life,
What would you do with it?
I’ d take my earrings out of hock,
Marry a blind man,
And live on a tree-lined block.
But Margarida,
If I gave you my life,
What would your mother say?
Now the summer air exerts its syrupy drag on the half-dark
City under the strict surveillance of quotation marks.
The citizens with their cockades and free will drift off
From the magnet of work to the terrible magnet of love.
In the far suburbs crenellated of Cartesian yards and gin
The tribe of mothers calls the tribe of children in
Across the bluing evening. It’ s the hour things get
To be excellently pointless, like describing the alphabet.
Any fool can get into an ocean
But it takes a Goddess
To get out of one.
What’ s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’ s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the
At nights birds hammered my unborn
child’ s heart to strength, each strike bringing
bones and spine to glow, her lungs pestled
loud as the sea I was raised a sea anemone
among women who cursed their hearts
out, soured themselves, never-brides,
into veranda shades, talcum and tea moistened
their quivering jaws, prophetic without prophecy.
Anvil-black, gleaming garlic nubs, the pageant arrived with sails unfurled
from Colchis and I rejoiced like a broken
“Faith” is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency!
This sunlight on snow.
This decrescendo
of covered stumps & brush —
stop for it.
Stop before the sled end-
over-ends down
the chin of the hill —
the way it always will
at the rock ⅔ of the way down.
Stop & shiver in it: the ring
of snow inside gloves,
the cusp of red forehead
like a sun just waiting to top
the hill. Every ill-built
I am happy living simply:
like a clock, or a calendar.
Worldly pilgrim, thin,
wise — as any creature. To know
the spirit is my beloved. To come to things — swift
as a ray of light, or a look.
To live as I write: spare — the way
God asks me — and friends do not.
1919
