The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass Pressed into it as you might at the beach rise up and brush away The sand. The day is cool and says, “I’m just staying overnight.” The world is filled with music, and in between the music, silence And varying the silence all sorts of sounds, natural and man made: There goes a plane, some cars, geese that honk and, not here, but Not so far away, a scream so rending that to hear it is to be
That child was dangerous. That just-born Newly washed and silent baby Wrapped in deerskin and held warm Against the side of its mother could understand The language of birds and animals Even when asleep. It knew why Bluejay Was scolding the bushes, what Hawk was explaining To the wind on the cliffside, what Bittern had found out While standing alone in marsh grass. It knew What the screams of Fox and the whistling of Otter Were telling the forest. That child knew The language of Fire As it gnawed at sticks like Beaver And what Water said all day and all night At the creek's mouth. As its small fingers
We finished clearing the last Section of trail by noon, High on the ridge-side Two thousand feet above the creek Reached the pass, went on Beyond the white pine groves, Granite shoulders, to a small Green meadow watered by the snow,
Cook was a captain of the Admiralty When sea-captains had the evil eye, Or should have, what with beating krakens off And casting nativities of ships; Cook was a captain of the powder-days When captains, you might have said, if you had been Fixed by their glittering stare, half-down the side,
The dark socket of the year the pit, the cave where the sun lies down and threatens never to rise, when despair descends softly as the snow covering all paths and choking roads:
then hawkfaced pain seized you threw you so you fell with a sharp
Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks. placed solid, by hands In choice of place, set Before the body of the mind in space and time: Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall riprap of things:
The glow of my campfire is dark red and flameless, The circle of white ash widens around it. I get up and walk off in the moonlight and each time I look back the red is deeper and the light smaller. Scorpio rises late with Mars caught in his claw; The moon has come before them, the light Like a choir of children in the young laurel trees.
A barefoot boy! I mark him at his play— For May is here once more, and so is he,— His dusty trousers, rolled half to the knee, And his bare ankles grimy, too, as they: Cross-hatchings of the nettle, in array Of feverish stripes, hint vividly to me Of woody pathways winding endlessly Along the creek, where even yesterday
"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land, "This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon." In the afternoon they came unto a land In which it seemed always afternoon. All round the coast the languid air did swoon, Breathing like one that hath a weary dream. Full-faced above the valley stood the moon; And like a downward smoke, the slender stream Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.
A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke, Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go; And some thro' wavering lights and shadows broke, Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below. They saw the gleaming river seaward flow
He crawls to the edge of the foaming creek He backs up the slab ledge He puts a finger in the water He turns to a trapped pool Puts both hands in the water Puts one foot in the pool Drops pebbles in the pool He slaps the water surface with both hands
ONE From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women. How unwomanly to discuss it! Like a noose or an albatross necktie The clinical sobriquet hangs us: codpiece coveters. Never mind these epithets; I myself have collected some honeys. Juvenal set us apart in denouncing our vices Which had grown, in part, from having been set apart: Women abused their spouses, cuckolded them, even plotted
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,
The coast hills at Sovranes Creek; No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin Over rock shaped like flame; The old ocean at the land’s foot, the vast Gray extension beyond the long white violence; A herd of cows and the bull Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope; And the gray air haunted with hawks:
DEscend from Heav'n Urania, by that name If rightly thou art call'd, whose Voice divine Following, above th' Olympian Hill I soare, Above the flight of Pegasean wing. The meaning, not the Name I call: for thou Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top Of old Olympus dwell'st, but Heav'nlie borne, Before the Hills appeerd, or Fountain flow'd, Thou with Eternal wisdom didst converse, Wisdom thy Sister, and with her didst play In presence of th' Almightie Father, pleas'd With thy Celestial Song.Up led by thee Into the Heav'n of Heav'ns I have presum'd, An Earthlie Guest, and drawn Empyreal Aire, Thy tempring; with like safetie guided down
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