When my eyes are weeds, 
And my lips are petals, spinning 
Down the wind that has beginning 
Where the crumpled beeches start
In a fringe of salty reeds; 
When my arms are elder-bushes, 
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart; 

Summer, do your worst!
Light your tinsel moon, and call on 
Your performing stars to fall on
Headlong through your paper sky; 
Nevermore shall I be cursed
By a flushed and amorous slattern, 
With her dusty laces’ pattern
Trailing, as she straggles by. 

It is the summer of the day, the gold-bodied hour, the good bookless eternity. It is the epoch of blaze, labia, white oblivion. No melancholy yet, nor reverie, nor singing, barely any talk—it is the matterful backs of cattle, thigh-quiet of tree trunk, insect wing nickeled with sun. It is a horse standing flat foot casting no shadow, the wishbone of fire on the flicker’s neck. It is the blessed hopeless hour, red thunder inside the watermelon.

No wind, no bird. The river flames like brass.
On either side, smitten as with a spell
Of silence, brood the fields. In the deep grass,
Edging the dusty roads, lie as they fell
Handfuls of shriveled leaves from tree and bush.
But ’long the orchard fence and at the gate,
Thrusting their saffron torches through the hush,
Wild lilies blaze, and bees hum soon and late.
Rust-colored the tall straggling briar, not one
Rose left. The spider sets its loom up there
Close to the roots, and spins out in the sun
A silken web from twig to twig. The air
Is full of hot rank scents. Upon the hill
Drifts the noon’s single cloud, white, glaring, still.

I’m on a bike and someone’s name is forming.

The road is potholes the road is dust.

Cruising the dirt, the meadow humming with bugs.

Dust rising, tires crushing rock, bats ejecting from under the barn

streaming the insected air the pulse life repeating life looping back

slowing down getting longer though it didn’t and isn’t.

A little letting go of fear.

A little spittle in death’s eye.

Don’t ask don’t think (I didn’t ask or think).

Didn’t think don’t think.

I remember giving in to it lying back and then

little sprout of willow

spray of the earth green of leaves the light coming down

as if through a ferny veil dirty primal randomly animate

and we are in it still.

Hot in June a narrow winged
long-elbowed-thread-legged
living insect lived
and died within
the lodgers' second-floor bathroom here.

At six a.m.
wafting ceilingward,
no breeze but what it living made there;

at noon standing
still as a constellation of spruce needles
before the moment of
making it, whirling;

at four a
wilted flotsam, cornsilk, on the linoleum:

now that it is
over, I
look with new eyes
upon this room
adequate for one to
be, in.

Its insect-day
has threaded a needle
for me for my eyes dimming
over rips and tears and
thin places.