Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes
Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes,
Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes,
And eyes and ears and mouth and nose,
Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes.
Heart Valve
They told me there’ d be pain
so when I felt it,
sitting at my beat-up farm desk
that looks out glass doors
onto the browning garden — plain sparrows
bathing in the cube-shaped fountain
so violently they drain it,
the white-throats with their
wobbly two-note song
on the long way south still,
and our dogs
out like lights and almost
falling off their chairs
freed of the real-time for awhile
as time began for me
to swell, slow down, carry me out
of all this almost
to a where
Heart, my box of snow
made it to Florida
and then I went for a walk.
The frog pond is half-iced over.
I chucked a stick at it —
still thin. On the white side,
the wind twirled a leaf around
like a prepubescent figure skater
who’s given up her childhood
to get here. Of course, the leaf
was wearing its practice costume
of browns, the whole world
offed of spangles as I am
offed of you. Why
mail snow? Just to show
I could keep it cold
in so much heat.
Heat Wave
Sheets entangle him
Naked on his bed
Like a toppled mast
Slack sails bedeck
At sea, no ballast
For that even keel
He cannot keep —
No steering wheel
As he falls asleep
Heath XXIX
Twenty-four thousand times in any year, lightning strikes
and kills. On the Heath, the timber shells, like bony Flemish spires,
point heavenwards in warning. The stags take note and bow their heads
at the sky’ s first challenge, or hurl a bellowing peal back in defiance.
Hedgehog
The snail moves like a
Hovercraft, held up by a
Rubber cushion of itself,
Sharing its secret
With the hedgehog. The hedgehog
Shares its secret with no one.
We say, Hedgehog, come out
Of yourself and we will love you.
We mean no harm. We want
Only to listen to what
You have to say. We want
Your answers to our questions.
The hedgehog gives nothing
Away, keeping itself to itself.
We wonder what a hedgehog
Has to hide, why it so distrusts.
Heft
and hue
to have unheld a scale —
silver dishes little mirrors on their chains —
they go that way, This
and hoist
It’s not like looking into a pool,
to let your intelligence run away with you
Come back quarter size, apricot moon
A changeling is a child who
appeared under cover
of the ordinary, in exchange
Height Is the Distance Down
What’s geography? What difference what mountain
it is? In the intimacy of this altitude
its discolored snowfields overhang half the world.
On a knife rim edge-up into whirlpools of sky,
feet are no anchor. Gravity sucks at the mind
spinning the blood-weighted body head downward.
Hephaestus Alone
His heart is like a boat that sets forth alone
on the ocean and goes far out from him,
as Aphrodite proceeds on her pleasure journeys.
He pours the gold down the runnels
into a great mystery under the sand.
When he pulls it up by the feet
and knocks off the scale, it is a god.
What is it she finds with those men
Her
There is no noisier place than the suburbs,
someone once said to me
as we were walking along a fairway,
and every day is delighted to offer fresh evidence:
the chainsaw, the leaf-blower blowing
one leaf around an enormous house with columns,
on Mondays and Thursdays the garbage truck
equipped with air brakes, reverse beeper, and merciless grinder.
There’ s dogs, hammers, backhoes
or serious earthmovers if today is not your day.
How can the birds get a peep
or a chirp in edgewise, I would like to know?