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Your parents had reached a long slow time,
as animals do, the great center of their lives,
when they gleam in their fells as though eternally,
unchanging. Or as a day can seem eternal
if you lie and watch the full clouds, conscious
of your own time: you soon must get up and leave.
So father, mother, the small shabby town,
its patch of earth going on as though forever: you
forgot them there, where they’ d been since you started out
and where you could find them again — as anyone
forgets what he has to lean on

You couples lying
where moon-scythes and day-scythes reaped you,
browning fruit falls and sleeps
in tangled nests, the wild grass,
falls from your apple tree that still grows here:
cry for your dead hero, his weak sword, his flight,
that you were slaughtered and your bed poured whiteness,
the issue of murdered marriage dawns.
The streets crack, a house falls open to the air,
sun and rain lie on the bed.
And the river still runs in a child’ s hands
under the factory’ s black hulk,

Child
one with the sun
in trackless fields
of yellow grass and thistle, scent
of humid heavy air and the wing music
of bees and flies.

Child, slender
nakedness to itself unknown,
true colour of the light
dispersed invisibly
or glowing around the black hulls
of distant thunderheads, around
the grasshopper’ s countenance,
solemn, vigilant and wise.

He glanced around to check if the treacherous gods
had really given him the reward promised for his accomplished song
and there she was, Eurydice restored, perfectly naked and fleshed
in her rhyming body again, the upper and lower smiles and eyes,
the line of mouth-sternum-navel-cleft, the chime of breasts and hips
and of the two knees, the feet, the toes, and that expression
of an unimaginable intelligence that yoked all these with a skill
she herself had forgotten the learning of: there she was, with him

About the age of twenty, when the first hairfall
signals that nature is finished with the organism
and we just begin to conceive the use of women
(having been all this time
more enamored of the fountain than the cistern),
we retire to nursing homes,
whether they be kaleidoscopic gardens
aimed like a blunderbuss of hermeticism at our neighbors,
or a desperate dream safari through old Zambesi,
where the suicidal waves of angry natives
give the illusion that we are advancing rapidly,

Your idea of embracing horror
was overwhelmed by the horror:

When he had suckled there, he began
to grow: first, he was an infant in her arms,
but soon, drinking and drinking at the sweet
milk she could not keep from filling her,
from pouring into his ravenous mouth,
and filling again, miraculous pitcher, mercy
feeding its own extinction... soon he was

If the nose of the pig in the market of Firenze
has lost its matte patina, and shines, brassy,
even in the half light; if the mosaic saint
on the tiles of the Basilica floor is half gone,
worn by the gravity of solid soles, the passing
of piety; if the arms of Venus have reentered
the rubble, taken by time, her perennial lover,
mutilating even the memory of beauty;

When History turns soldiers into battles, you turn them into grass.
Bashō, Sweet, is it honorable? But for these men who died with grunts
and clangs in their ears, for their horses with snapped legs, I haven’ t got
the art to make them into anything. I fold the grass in the shape
of a man, very literal, very primitive and leave it on
the field and say, “Forgive me valorous men for my ineptitude.”
Just then, the little man falls down in the wind and — huh! — there is art.

In case you sit across from the meteorologist tonight,
and in case the dim light over the booth in the bar still shines
almost planetary on your large, smooth, winter-softened
forehead, in case all of the day — its woods and play, its fire —
has stayed on your beard, and will stay through the slight
drift of mouth, the slackening of even your heart's muscle —
... well. I am filled with snow. There's nothing to do now
but wait.