All power is saved, having no end. Rises in the green season, in the sudden season the white the budded and the lost. Water celebrates, yielding continually sheeted and fast in its overfall slips down the rock, evades the pillars building its colonnades, repairs
Purged, with the life they left, of all That makes life paltry and mean and small, In their new dedication charged With something heightened, enriched, enlarged, That lends a light to their lusty brows And a song to the rhythm of their trampling feet, These are the men that have taken vows,
Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar, complex scent arrives from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in the end of the wretched winter. The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are budded —I hadn't noticed — and the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have already broken the gritty soil.
A Sestina We are the smiling comfortable homes With happy families enthroned therein, Where baby souls are brought to meet the world, Where women end their duties and desires,
The plunging limbers over the shattered track Racketed with their rusty freight, Stuck out like many crowns of thorns, And the rusty stakes like sceptres old To stay the flood of brutish men Upon our brothers dear.
The wheels lurched over sprawled dead But pained them not, though their bones crunched, Their shut mouths made no moan. They lie there huddled, friend and foeman, Man born of man, and born of woman, And shells go crying over them From night till night and now.
The angel — three years we waited for him, attention riveted, closely scanning the pines the shore the stars. One with the blade of the plough or the ship’s keel we were searching to find once more the first seed so that the age-old drama could begin again.
When I see birches bend to left and right Across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning After a rain. They click upon themselves As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
It is an afternoon toward the end of August: Autumnal weather, cool following on, And riding in, after the heat of summer, Into the empty afternoon shade and light,
The shade full of light without any thickness at all; You can see right through and right down into the depth Of the light and shade of the afternoon; there isn’t Any weight of the summer pressing down.
Midmorning like a deserted room, apparition Of armoire and table weights, Oblongs of flat light, the rosy eyelids of lovers Raised in their ghostly insurrection, Decay in the compassed corners beating its black wings, Late June and the lilac just ajar.
Where the deer trail sinks down through the shadows of blue spruce,
Comment form: