Nature

O Month when they who love must love and wed! 
Were one to go to worlds where May is naught, 
And seek to tell the memories he had brought 
From earth of thee, what were most fitly said? 
I know not if the rosy showers shed
From apple-boughs, or if the soft green wrought 
In fields, or if the robin’s call be fraught
The most with thy delight.   Perhaps they read 
Thee best who in the ancient time did say 
Thou wert the sacred month unto the old: 
No blossom blooms upon thy brightest day 
So subtly sweet as memories which unfold
In aged hearts which in thy sunshine lie, 
To sun themselves once more before they die. 

Yesterday: me, a stone, the river,
a bottle of Jack, the clouds
with unusual speed crept by.

A man was in the middle of me.
I was humbled.
Not by him. The earth,

with its unusual speed,
went from dawn to dusk to dawn.
Just like that. The light

every shade of gold. Gold. I’m
greedy for it. Light is my currency.
I am big with dawn. So hot & so

pregnant with the fire I stole.
By pregnant I mean everything
you see is of me. Daylight

is my daughter. Dusk, my lover’s
post-pleasure face. And the night?
Well. Look up.

Are you ever really alone?

The mist has left the greening plain, 

The dew-drops shine like fairy rain, 

The coquette rose awakes again 

     Her lovely self adorning. 

 
The Wind is hiding in the trees, 

A sighing, soothing, laughing tease, 

Until the rose says "kiss me, please" 

    'Tis morning, 'tis morning. 

 
With staff in hand and careless-free, 

The wanderer fares right jauntily, 

For towns and houses are, thinks he, 

   For scorning, for scorning,

My soul is swift upon the wing, 

And in its deeps a song I bring; 

come, Love, and we together sing, 

" 'Tis morning, 'tis morning." 

I’m tired of the gloom  

In a four-walled room;  

Heart-weary, I sigh  

For the open sky,  

And the solitude  

Of the greening wood;  

Where the bluebirds call,  

And the sunbeams fall,  

And the daisies lure 

The soul to be pure.  

I’m tired of the life 

In the ways of strife;  

Heart-weary, I long  

For the river’s song,  

And the murmur of rills  

In the breezy hills;  

Where the pipe of Pan— 

The hairy half-man— 

The bright silence breaks  

By the sleeping lakes.   

I.

That was a great night we spied upon 
See-sawing home, 
Singing a hot sweet song to the super-stars 
Shuffling off behind the smoke-haze . . . 
Fog-horns sentimentalizing on the river . .  . 
Lights dwindling to shining slits 
In the wet asphalt. . . 
Purring lights . . . red and green and golden - whiskered . . . 
Digging daintily pointed claws in the soft mud . . . 
. . . But you did not know. . . 
As the trains made golden augers 
Boring in the darkness . . . 
How my heart kept racing out along the rails, 
As a spider runs along a thread
And hauls him in again
To some drawing point . . . 
You did not know 
How wild ducks’ wings 
Itch at dawn . . . 
How at dawn the necks of wild ducks 
Arch to the sun 
And new-mown air 
Trickles sweet in their gullets. 

II.

As water, cleared of the reflection of a bird 
That has lately flown across it, 
Yet trembles with the beating of its wings, 
So my soul . . . emptied of the known you . . . utterly . . . 
Is yet vibrant with the cadence of the song 
You might have been . . . 
‘Twas a great night. . . 
With never a waste look over a shoulder 
Curved to the crook of the wind . . . 
And a great word we threw 
For memory to play knuckles with . . . 
A word the waters of the world have washed, 
Leaving it stark and without smell . . . 
A world that rattles well in emptiness: 
       Good-by.