Life
I made a posy, while the day ran by:
“Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie
My life within this band.”
But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away,
And withered in my hand.
Light
Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour,
unaccountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples —
I think of a troop of the blissful blessed approaching Dante,
“a hundred spheres shining,” he rhapsodizes, “the purest pearls…”
then of the frightening brilliants myriad gleam in my lamp
of the eyes of the vast swarm of bats I found once in a cave,
a chamber whose walls seethed with a spaceless carpet of creatures,
their cacophonous, keen, insistent, incessant squeakings and squealings
Light and Dark
Lady, take care; for in the diamond eyes
Of old old men is figured your undoing;
Love is turned in behind the wrinkled lids
To nurse their fear and scorn at their near going.
Flesh hangs like the curtains in a house
Long unused, damp as cellars without wine;
They are the future of us all, when we
Will be dried-leaf-thin, the sour whine
Light chaff and falling leaves or a pair of feathers
on the ground can spook a horse who won’ t flinch when faced
with a backhoe or a pack of Harleys. I call it “horse
ophthalmology,” because it is a different kind of system —
not celestial, necessarily, but vision in which the small,
the wispy, the lightly lifted or stirring threads of existence
excite more fear than louder and larger bodies do. It’ s Matthew
who said that the light of the body is the eye, and that if
the eye is healthy the whole body will be full of light. Maybe
Lightness in Autumn
The rake is like a wand or fan,
With bamboo springing in a span
To catch the leaves that I amass
In bushels on the evening grass.
I reckon how the wind behaves
And rake them lightly into waves
And rake the waves upon a pile,
Then stop my raking for a while.
Like a Sentence
How little we know,
and when we know it!
It was prettily said that “No man
hath an abundance of cows on the plain, nor shards
in his cupboard.” Wait! I think I know who said that! It was...
Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives in
Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,
in me are lives I do not know the names of,
nor the fates of,
nor the hungers of or what they eat.
They eat of me.
Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me
whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink.
And in my streets — the narrow ones,
unlabeled on the self-map —
they follow stairs down music ears can’ t follow,
Lime
The victorious army marches into the city,
& not far behind tarries a throng of women
Who slept with the enemy on the edge
Of battlements. The stunned morning
Opens into a dust cloud of hooves
& drums. Some new priests cradle
Stone tablets, & others are poised
With raised mallets in a forest of defeated
Statuary. Of course, behind them
Linger the turncoats & pious
Merchants of lime. What’ s Greek
Is forged into Roman; what’ s Roman
Lincoln
Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!
How just and true that this great nation, being conceived
In liberty by fugitives should find
— Strange ways and plays of monstrous History —
This Hamlet-type to be the President —
This failure, this unwilling bridegroom,
This tricky lawyer full of black despair —
Line of Descent
Against the backdark, bright
riband flickers of heat lightning. Nearer
hills begin to show, to come clear
as a hard, detached
and glimmering brim