"Come, pretty birds, present your lays,
And learn to chaunt a goddess praise;
Ye wood-nymphs, let your voices be
Employ'd to serve her deity:
And warble forth, ye virgins nine,
Some music to my Valentine.
"Her bosom is love's paradise,
There is no heav'n but in her eyes;
She's chaster than the turtle-dove,
And fairer than the queen of love:
Yet all perfections do combine
To beautifie my Valentine.
Beloved beauty who inspires
love in me from afar, your face obscured
except when your celestial image
stirs my heart in sleep, or in the fields
where light and nature's laughter shine more lovely —
was it maybe you who blessed
the innocent age called golden,
and do you now, blithe spirit,
fly among men? Or does that miser fate
who hides you from us save you for the future?
Why dost thou shade thy lovely face? O why
Does that eclipsing hand of thine deny
The sunshine of the Sun’ s enlivening eye?
Without thy light what light remains in me?
Thou art my life; my way, my light’ s in thee;
I live, I move, and by thy beams I see.
Thou art my life-if thou but turn away
My life’ s a thousand deaths. Thou art my way-
Without thee, Love, I travel not but stray.
My light thou art-without thy glorious sight
My eyes are darken’ d with eternal night.
My Love, thou art my way, my life, my light.
Best and brightest, come away!
Fairer far than this fair Day,
Which, like thee to those in sorrow,
Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow
To the rough Year just awake
In its cradle on the brake.
The Brightest hour of unborn Spring,
Through the winter wandering,
Found, it seems, the halcyon Morn
To hoar February born.
Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth,
It kissed the forehead of the Earth,
And smiled upon the silent sea,
And bade the frozen streams be free,
And waked to music all their fountains,
I only recognized your hair: short,
neatly combed. Our mother
would’ ve been proud.
In the Sonoran desert
your body became a slaughter-
house where faith and want were stunned,
hung upside down, gutted. We
were taught
to bring roses, to aim for the bush. Remember?
You tried to pork
a girl’ s armpit. In Border Patrol
jargon, the word
You change a life
as eating an artichoke changes the taste
of whatever is eaten after.
Yet you are not an artichoke, not a piano or cat —
not objectively present at all —
and what of you a cat possesses is essential but narrow:
to know if the distance between two things can be leapt.
The piano, that good servant,
has none of you in her at all, she lends herself
to what asks; this has been my ambition as well.
Yet a person who has you is like an iron spigot
whose water comes from far-off mountain springs.
Into the changes of autumn brush
the doe walked, and the hide, head, and ears
were the tinsel browns. They made her.
I could not see her. She reappeared, stuffed with apples,
and I shot her. Into the pines she ran,
and I ran after. I might have lost her,
seeing no sign of blood or scuffle,
but felt myself part of the woods,
a woman with a doe’ s ears, and heard her
dying, counted her last breaths like a song
of dying, and found her dying.
I shot her again because her lungs rattled like castanets,
To lie back under the tallest
oldest trees. How far the stems
rise, rise
before ribs of shelter
open!
To live in the mercy of God. The complete
sentence too adequate, has no give.
Awe, not comfort. Stone, elbows of
stony wood beneath lenient
moss bed.
You give me a little courage, Mary,
in your skittish dedication to her highness;
I too can dare as humbleness may dare;
if there’ s anywhere to speak with you, it’ s here
at the wordy Anglo-Saxon periphery
of the universe’ s one great surge of praise
though I’ m lost here. Where’ s the joyful noise?
the syllables I managed to memorize
before they were weighted down by meaning?
and what’ s all this complicated rhyme?
Don’ t mistake me — I’ m not complaining;
it’ s just not my notion of a psalm
Merry Margaret,
As midsummer flower,
Gentle as a falcon
Or hawk of the tower:
With solace and gladness,
Much mirth and no madness,
All good and no badness;
So joyously,
So maidenly,
So womanly
Her demeaning
In every thing,
