The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift, 
  The road is forlorn all day, 
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift, 
  And the hoof-prints vanish away. 
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
  Expend their bloom in vain. 
Come over the hills and far with me, 
  And be my love in the rain. 

The birds have less to say for themselves 
  In the wood-world’s torn despair
Than now these numberless years the elves, 
  Although they are no less there: 
All song of the woods is crushed like some 
  Wild, easily shattered rose. 
Come, be my love in the wet woods; come,
  Where the boughs rain when it blows. 

There is the gale to urge behind 
  And bruit our singing down, 
And the shallow waters aflutter with wind 
  From which to gather your gown.    
What matter if we go clear to the west, 
  And come not through dry-shod? 
For wilding brooch shall wet your breast 
  The rain-fresh goldenrod. 

Oh, never this whelming east wind swells   
  But it seems like the sea’s return 
To the ancient lands where it left the shells 
  Before the age of the fern; 
And it seems like the time when after doubt 
  Our love came back amain.      
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout 
  And be my love in the rain.

is a field 

             as long as the butterflies say 

                                                                       it is a field 

 
with their flight

 
                                         it takes a long time 

to see

                         like light or sound or language

                                                                                      to arrive

and keep 
                         arriving

 
 
                                       we have more

than six sense dialect

                                                                      and i

am still

              adjusting to time

 
                              the distance and its permanence

 
i have found my shortcuts

 
                             and landmarks

                                                          to place

 
where i first took form

                                                                                           in the field

^{—after lucille clifton}

the estuary opens to the bay
and the bay stretches into the pacific and so on 
therefore and such-and-such,
none of them empty or full
in the way no frame can minimize nor contain horizon—
yet the ocean can be it, even when sky
and sea are the same late summer gray
they blend together erasing, making
each other. the humpback whale
breaching the slate screen is the only
one who knows the tension between.
here arrive two children winding bikes
on the path to the point passing succulents
and ground squirrels, and three pelicans
follow in spinning dives to slash
down on this estuary guarded 
by gurgling sea lions. the children 
collecting rocks and examining mussel shells, 
millennia in their hands, nod to each other and laugh
racing childhood to the pier’s edge.

     <sup>because this planet's radiance overcame me
                             —Dante, Paradiso, IX, 33

Translation from Historiae by Antonella Anedda</sup>

I dreamt that I saw the earth from far away, 
I saw fields, the moon, the undertow
and how each tide undermines earth with water. 
I wanted to reach Saturn, my planet
of fire and lead, so I was nourishing melancholy. 
I was spinning in the fog looking for you and you were below
among the living. You loved who I was not and would never be
yet there in the void, in that sidereal light I saw 
the autumn spinning the leaves with verdigris, 
I was hearing the thud of the wind upon a bedsheet
as one voice was calling another
and this one responded as something in the evening 
that was approaching with the shadow that fell on the chairs.

Already there in glory, already overcome by the radiance between planets, 
and yet I was starving myself with envy for life. 

I wandered lonely as a Cloud
   That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
   A host of golden Daffodils;
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
   And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
   Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
   Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:—
A Poet could not but be gay
   In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie
   In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
   Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.

Light silken curtain, colorless and soft, 
Dreamlike before me floating! what abides 
                Behind thy pearly veil’s
                Opaque, mysterious woof?

Where sleek red kine, and dappled, crunch daylong 
Thick, luscious blades and purple clover-heads, 
                Nigh me I still can mark 
                Cool fields of beaded grass.

No more; for on the rim of the globed world 
I seem to stand and stare at nothingness. 
                But songs of unseen birds 
                And tranquil roll of waves

Bring sweet assurance of continuous life 
Beyond this silvery cloud. Fantastic dreams, 
                Of tissue subtler still 
                Than the wreathed fog, arise,

And cheat my brain with airy vanishings 
And mystic glories of the world beyond. 
                A whole enchanted town 
                Thy baffling folds conceal—

An orient town, with slender-steepled mosques, 
Turret from turret springing, dome from dome, 
                Fretted with burning stones, 
                And trellised with red gold.

Through spacious streets, where running waters flow, 
Sun-screened by fruit-trees and the broad-leaved palm, 
                Past the gay-decked bazaars, 
                Walk turbaned, dark-eyed men.

Hark! you can hear the many murmuring tongues, 
While loud the merchants vaunt their gorgeous wares. 
                The sultry air is spiced
                With fragrance of rich gums,

And through the lattice high in yon dead wall, 
See where, unveiled, an arch, young, dimpled face, 
                Flushed like a musky peach, 
                Peers down upon the mart!

From her dark, ringleted and bird-poised head 
She hath cast back the milk-white silken veil:
                ’Midst the blank blackness there 
                She blossoms like a rose.

Beckons she not with those bright, full-orbed eyes, 
And open arms that like twin moonbeams gleam? 
                Behold her smile on me 
                With honeyed, scarlet lips!

Divine Scheherazade! I am thine. 
I come! I come!—Hark! from some far-off mosque
                The shrill muezzin calls 
                The hour of silent prayer,

And from the lattice he hath scared by love. 
The lattice vanisheth itself—the street,
                The mart, the Orient town;
                Only through still, soft air

That cry is yet prolonged. I wake to hear
The distant fog-horn peal: before mine eyes 
                Stands the white wall of mist, 
                Blending with vaporous skies.

Elusive gossamer, impervious 
Even to the mighty sun-god’s keen red shafts! 
                With what a jealous art 
                Thy secret thou dost guard!

Well do I know deep in thine inmost folds, 
Within an opal hollow, there abides 
                The lady of the mist, 
                The Undine of the air—

A slender, winged, ethereal, lily form, 
Dove-eyed, with fair, free-floating, pearl-wreathed hair, 
                In waving raiment swathed
                Of changing, irised hues.

Where her feet, rosy as a shell, have grazed 
The freshened grass, a richer emerald glows:
                Into each flower-cup 
                Her cool dews she distills.

She knows the tops of jagged mountain-peaks,
She knows the green soft hollows of their sides, 
                And unafraid she floats 
                O’er the vast-circled seas.

She loves to bask within the moon’s wan beams, 
Lying, night-long, upon the moist, dark earth, 
                And leave her seeded pearls 
                With morning on the grass.

Ah! that athwart these dim, gray outer courts
Of her fantastic palace I might pass, 
                And reach the inmost shrine 
                Of her chaste solitude,

And feel her cool and dewy fingers press 
My mortal-fevered brow, while in my heart
                She poured with tender love 
                Her healing Lethe-balm!

See! the close curtain moves, the spell dissolves! 
Slowly it lifts: the dazzling sunshine streams 
                Upon a newborn world and laughing summer seas. 
                And laughing summer seas.

Swift, snowy-breasted sandbirds twittering glance 
Through crystal air. On the horizon’s marge, 
                Like a huge purple wraith, 
                The dusky fog retreats.

The park is filled with night and fog, 
  The veils are drawn about the world, 
The drowsy lights along the paths 
  Are dim and pearled.

Gold and gleaming the empty streets, 
  Gold and gleaming the misty lake, 
The mirrored lights light sunken swords, 
  Glimmer and shake.

Oh, is it not enough to be 
Here with this beauty over me?
My throat should ache with praise, and I 
Should kneel in joy beneath the sky. 
Oh, beauty, are you not enough?

Why am I crying after love 
With youth, a singing voice and eyes
To take earth’s wonder with surprise?
Why have I put off my pride, 
Why am I unsatisfied, 
I for whom the pensive night
Binds her cloudy hair with light,
I for whom all beauty burns 
Like incense in a million urns? 
Oh, beauty, are you not enough? 
Why am I crying after love?

Rich raptures, you say, our dreams assume,

Slaking the heart’s immortal thirst?

Only the old we reillume;

But think—to have dreamed the flowers first!

Think,—to have dreamed the first blue sea;

Imaged every illustrious hue

Of the earliest sunset’s tapestry;

And the snow,—and the birds, when their songs were new!

Think,—from the blue of highest heaven

To have sown all the stars, to have whispered “Light!”—

Hung a moon in a prismy even,

Spun a world on its splendid flight!

To have first conceived of boundless Space;

To have thought so small as to garb the trees;

All planet years in your mind’s embrace,—

And the midge’s life, for all of these!

And Man still boasts of his brain’s weak best

In dream or invention; from first to last

Blunders ’mid wonders barely guessed.

And fondly believes that his thoughts are “vast”!

there is a kind of memory that feels, somehow
suddenly, like a wound, though not always, not until
one wanders back through: the dark, damp alley the only path 
toward home—every place i have loved has forced me to leave.
and then there is memory as one might always wish: 
bejeweled, like sugar on the tongue upon reentry.
what is the name for the scent that whispers mother,
the twanged hue of evening that gestures island,
limestone, cane, spume? Flatbush, i have sauntered away
from everything that has called me kin now,
as i have before, but in what little time we have left,
let me remember you, let me remember what lay beneath
your weather—your snow-born streams, your troubled foliage. 
guinep, worship, convenience, heel and toe. old dream,
will either of us return to what we once were? to when?

^{translated from the German by Jessie Lamont}

Oh! All things are long passed away and far.
A light is shining but the distant star
From which it still comes to me has been dead
A thousand years . . . In the dim phantom boat
That glided past some ghastly thing was said.
A clock just struck within some house remote.
Which house?—I long to still my beating heart.
Beneath the sky’s vast dome I long to pray . . .
Of all the stars there must be far away
A single star which still exists apart.
And I believe that I should know the one
Which has alone endured and which alone
Like a white City that all space commands
At the ray’s end in the high heaven stands.