At evening when the lamp is lit,
Around the fire my parents sit;
They sit at home and talk and sing,
And do not play at anything.

Now, with my little gun, I crawl
All in the dark along the wall,
And follow round the forest track
Away behind the sofa back.

There, in the night, where none can spy,
All in my hunter's camp I lie,
And play at books that I have read
Till it is time to go to bed.

These are the hills, these are the woods,
These are my starry solitudes;
And there the river by whose brink
The roaring lions come to drink.

I see the others far away
As if in firelit camp they lay,
And I, like to an Indian scout,
Around their party prowled about.

So, when my nurse comes in for me,
Home I return across the sea,
And go to bed with backward looks
At my dear land of Story-books.

In these lonely regions I have been powerful
in the same way as a cheerful tool
or like untrammeled grass which lets loose its seed
or like a dog rolling around in the dew.
Matilde, time will pass wearing out and burning
another skin, other fingernails, other eyes, and then
the algae that lashed our wild rocks,
the waves that unceasingly construct their own whiteness,
all will be firm without us,
all will be ready for the new days,
which will not know our destiny.

What do we leave here but the lost cry
of the seabird, in the sand of winter, in the gusts of wind
that cut our faces and kept us
erect in the light of purity,
as in the heart of an illustrious star?

What do we leave, living like a nest
of surly birds, alive, among the thickets
or static, perched on the frigid cliffs?
So then, if living was nothing more than anticipating
the earth, this soil and its harshness,
deliver me, my love, from not doing my duty, and help me
return to my place beneath the hungry earth.

We asked the ocean for its rose,
its open star, its bitter contact,
and to the overburdened, to the fellow human being, to the wounded
we gave the freedom gathered in the wind.
It's late now. Perhaps
it was only a long day the color of honey and blue,
perhaps only a night, like the eyelid
of a grave look that encompassed
the measure of the sea that surrounded us,
and in this territory we found only a kiss,
only ungraspable love that will remain here
wandering among the sea foam and roots.

Until I die, I shall abide by books—

feeling the leather and the gilded spine,

running my thumb along the rippled edge,

sensing the musty cloth, the wormy page,

the odor of a chest or rooms untended

where some distant heir one day divined

a windfall for his bank account, and called

on me. Here, watch your step; I cannot



see, but my companion says that books

have almost filled the hallway, overflowed

the bedroom, where I feel their presence

in the night among my dreams,—Will you have

a cup of tea and scones, or else a hot cross

bun, to mark the season? Yes, all London

bustles here near Oxford Street, and I suppose

I need the sense that others are about;



but what we know most keenly is desire,

and in desire I know the darkness, not

the life I hear but that which I Imagine—

the way you, reading of the Trojan War

or the Crusades, perhaps, are startled

by the telephone, thinking of Helen’s face

instead, of Hector’s body pulled behind

the wheels of arrogance. Tamer of horses



I can never be—but rider of another world

informed by paper—and, for me, in tongues

beneath my fingertips. To sell, of course,

is necessary, and I thank you; but I need

to feel behind me, too, this field of words

aflame, where blinded poets make the Sirens

sing, and I can almost glimpse the light,

the dazzling seascape that Odysseus sailed.

Reading, we are allowed to follow someone else’s train of thought as it starts off for an imaginary place. This train has been produced for us—or rather materialized and extended until it is almost nothing like the ephemeral realizations with which we’re familiar. To see words pulled one by one into existence is to intrude on a privacy of sorts. But we are familiar with the contract between spectator and performer. Now the text isn’t a train but an actress/model who takes off her school uniform piece by piece alone with the cameraman. She’s a good girl playing at being bad, all the time knowing better. She invites us to join her in that knowledge. But this is getting us nowhere.