My poems: fledglings, heirs,
Plaintiffs and executors,
The silent ones, the loud,
The humble and the proud.
As soon as the shovel of time
Threw me onto the potter’ s wheel —
Myself without kith or kin —
I grew beneath the hand, a miracle.
Something stretched out my long neck
And hollowed round my soul
And marked on my back
Legends of flowers and leaves.
I stoked the birch in the fire
As Daniel commanded
And blessed my red temper
Until I spoke as a prophet.
A telephone line goes cold;
birds tread it wherever it goes.
A farm back of a great plain
tugs an end of the line.
I call that farm every year,
ringing it, listening, still;
no one is home at the farm,
the line gives only a hum.
Some year I will ring the line
on a night at last the right one,
and with an eye tapered for braille
from the phone on the wall
I will see the tenant who waits —
the last one left at the place;
through the dark my braille eye
will lovingly touch his face.
Saturday morning in late March.
I was alone and took a long walk,
though I also carried a book
of the Alone, which companioned me.
At this hour the soul floats weightlessly
through the city streets, speechless and invisible,
astonished by the smoky blend of grays and golds
seeping out of the air, the dark half-tones
of dusk suddenly filling the urban sky
while the body sits listlessly by the window
sullen and heavy, too exhausted to move,
too weary to stand up or to lie down.
there is a dark mass following me. these legs are clumsy. they flap quickly.
I want to slow them down. but my nerves. Lord, these pensive endings.
the sun slumps against the merging fall on red leaves.
and where the natives are unenlightened, the mass comes closer.
only white people swim in lakes nowadays
you know... Crystal Lake?
Flashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clung
to the dark of it: the legs of the spider
held the tucked wings close,
held the abdomen still in the midst of calling
with thrusts of phosphorescent light —
The sculptures in this gallery have been
carefully treated with a protective wax
so that visitors may touch them.
— exhibitions, the art institute
of chicago
Stone soldier, it's okay now.
I've removed my rings, my watch, my bracelets.
I'm allowed, brave girl,
to touch you here, where the mail covers your throat,
your full neck, down your shoulders
to here, where raised unlatchable buckles
mock-fasten your plated armor.
Nothing peels from you.
I summon up Panofskv from his bed
Among the famous dead
To build a tomb which, since I am not read,
Suffers the stone’ s mortality instead;
Which, by the common iconographies
Of simple visual ease,
Usurps the place of the complexities
Of sound survivors once preferred to noise:
I stumble down around torn peaks
“Fit the right suit
to trick them all.”
the questions fall
around allure. Poems floated
from the hearth
sparks
In a year the nightingales were said to be so loud
they drowned out slumber, and peafowl strolled screaming
beside the ruined nunnery, through the long evening
of a dazzled pub crawl, the halcyon color, portholed
by those eye-spots’ stunning tapestry, unsettled
the pastoral nightfall with amazements opening.
