Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths--and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
Here in this fat city
Men seventy-two inches short
Have frozen their dreams
Into steel and concrete
Six hundred feet tall
Thin fingers
On the hard hand
Of Chicago's loop
Are these skyscrapers
Rubbing bright sides
Of rainbow stars
Tearing the gray gauze
Of low clouds
Dipping in the sizzling pot
Of a summer sun
Passing the jeweled moon
A tom-tom sun awakens day's jungle with heat beats
The moon was a white war canoe moored to the night
Morning stars scurry to cover like shaking hares fearful of the Great Yellow Hunter
Last night's tall hunchback fishing in a pool of raven's breasts is a green elm tree
Thin wings of grass pound helplessly against hard ground
And the robins are no longer afraid . . .
Through jail windows a new full moon is a round white door rendered useless by stout steel bars
Frogs see a new full moon as a luminous toadstool sprouting from the black floor of a pond
To the thief and the murderer it is a busy stoolpigeon tipping off cops and intended victims
To a young man in love the new full moon is a priceless pearl he would tear from the sky . . . set in a ring woven from sparkling stars . . . place on the finger of his sweetheart's hand
The new full moon is a beautiful woman . . . ageless . . . deathless . . . inaccessible . . . and infinitely mysteriously sad . . . who gazes in my window through a dark veil set with shimmering stars . . . the poet said
Who knows?
Perhaps the cloudless night
is a veil of dull black silk
set with small white diamonds
and one yellow pearl
to cover the face
of the infinite
from the vulgar gaze of man.
The moon
pours liquid beams
on hard white snow
that hit with a splash
then freeze
to nothingness
while the wind
laughs at pines
thoughtful
shivering
sighing for spring
leaning on hills
coldly defiant
guarding bodies
of dead streams
in hard coffins
Moored to the decaying piling
Of a ruined wharf, and whiling
Endless hours away in dreams of days gone by,
Lies a battered hulk, dismasted,
Broken backed and tempest blasted,
Like a dolphin fast aground and left to die.
Deck awash and planking slanted
Like a broken lily planted
In the mud, where every tide the eddies swirl,
Years have gone since last it floated
And the sea growths all unnoted,
Underneath its rotting timbers twine and curl.
Often when my footsteps tended
To that lonely shore that ended
All its voyagings there sounded in my ear,
What the shrilling sea birds uttered
O bony relic of forgotten days,
Which, from my bookshelf, dominates the room,
Your empty sockets, with sardonic gaze,
Follow me weirdly in the deepening gloom!
I often think, if sudden speech returned,
You might reveal that secret, grisly jest
You're grinning at—or tell me what you've learned
Of that dark realm to which we're all addressed.
By what rude hands were you exhumed, and why
Wrenched from your body in its earthy bed?
Who knows but such indignity will I
Receive at other hands, when I am dead,
And, strangely resurrected, may adorn
The wall or desk of one as yet unborn!
The sky was touched with tints of morn,
A wind was in the trees,
I lay in bed awakened
By the murmur of the leaves.
I listened to the chirping
Of the first-awakened bird,
And, his leather heels a-clicking,
Some lad off to work I heard.
Then my thoughts to sleep returning
Wondered briefly, of us three,
What brave paths the fates have destined
For the bird, the lad and me.
you'll come to this, lovingly rooting
in earth, gently setting to one side
fat worms, watching them
sink from sight with shrugs of their nonexistent
shoulders. As your wrists dry up, caked
in clay, you'll look around you, and
your small red barn, your irises,
your bamboo patch, your ash and oak,
your three unfurling maples whispering in the breeze,
your white house bracketed in lilacs, breathing
smoke, your woodshed stacked with fir,
your mint and parsley putting on new life,
your pears and apples, your geese in their bright plumes
will bring to you the thought of what this is
that you are digging, bit by troweled bit.
Assuming that the clouds will come, which now
walks between the beds
critical of eye, noting the way the leaves
of corn have curled upon themselves,
rattling in hardly any breeze at all.
They'd like to make believe it's Autumn now,
would they? Playing at getting past the part
where seed heads form, waving their silky hair,
and then depart, leaving the leaves bereft
of any purpose but to leave this world --
except, of course, they don't: that is the gift
of mulch. She brings the hose and couples to
its end a yellow whirligig, made to sing
the holy song of water to the leaves.
Today, green fullness. Tomorrow, living grain.
I await you.
People pass
and glance,
curious. I do not
mind; you may
arrive or you
may not. What I
have done, I have done.