Rural Reflections
This is the grass your feet are planted on
You paint it orange or you sing it green,
But you have never foundA way to make the grass mean what you mean
A cloud can be whatever you intend:
This is the grass your feet are planted on
You paint it orange or you sing it green,
But you have never foundA way to make the grass mean what you mean
A cloud can be whatever you intend:
Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—only the thumb is larger, longer—in these handsI could trust the world, or in many hands like these,handling power-tools or steering-wheelor touching a human face… Such hands could turnthe unborn child r...
She had thought the studio would keep itself;no dust upon the furniture of love
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,the panes relieved of grime
A plate of pears,a piano with a Persian shawl, a catstalking the picturesque amusing mou...
II can see myself years back at Sunion,hurting with an infected foot,
Philoctetesin woman’s form, limping the long path,lying on a headland over the dark sea,looking down the red rocks to where a soundless curlof white told me a wave had stru...
Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,
Next year and when I'm fifty; still good-by
This is the leave we never really take
If you were dead or gone to live in
Every peak is a crater
This is the law of volcanoes,making them eternally and visibly female
No height without depth, without a burning core,though our straw soles shred on the hardened lava
I want to travel with you to every sacred...
First having read the book of myths,and loaded the camera,and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put onthe body-armor of black rubberthe absurd flippersthe grave and awkward mask
I am having to do thisnot like Cousteau with hisassidu...
II wake up in your bed
I know I have been dreaming
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,you’ve been at your desk for hours
I know what I dreamed:our friend the poet comes into my roomwhere I’ve been writing for days,draf...
Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty
I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown under an arcade
I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powersand those powers severely limitedby authorities whose faces I rarely see
I am a woman in the prime of ...
Living in the earth-deposits of our history Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earthone bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-oldcure for fever or melancholy a tonicfor living on this earth in the winters of this climate
Today...
Your silence today is a pond where drowned things liveI want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun
It’s not my own face I see there, but other faces,even your face at another age
Whatever’s lost there is needed by both of us—a ...