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.