We dance
on one leg
and dine together on a tongue.
Who is going to lay up
a box of rich things?
Who is enlarging his horse?
We walk
on glass stairs
to sudden fortune or to love
and make the best stories,
the most pleasant stories—
how on such
a night as this
she and I found some trivial business
and took occasion
to go to bed.
Wine and wormwood,
we two who
are ever wooing—
picture and price,
water and fire,
book and song,
heaven and bed.
Take me to the dolphin.
A good husband is ballast, but he
is knowing in sea-business
and in the ice.
I row and look.
His is a serious art.
Feathers in fish invite awe—
a sign that the king cannot see.
We sing, my wife and I.
We put my books and her books to bed.
I eat out of the pot
his gold-laced suit still
on my mind
lying in bed
with my wife—
winter afternoon
To paint the sea is to see
the mad lover,
not the house where we
at last bid good night.
An oyster’s
answer to a tear—
I choose one for
my wife and one,
like so much in
my mind, to keep
to myself.
My wife and I in bed
fell into a music,
rose singing to rose,
and all day in the office
I can hardly bring myself to eat
a bit of bread.
I dined with her and found
what heat the alchemist
took home in a bottle:
a letter from July,
wind and fever.
The guitar spoke
of love and war, sand and water,
and showed the ships to my wife
in my absence.
My private bone, my chance heart,
my Walden in a wardrobe, my rose—
all night we lay
in one green bed.