May Swenson

The binocular owl,
fastened to a limblike a lanternall night long,
sees where allthe other birds sleep:
towhee under leaves

Fruit without a stone, its shiny
pulp is clear green.
Inside, tiny
black microdot seeds.

We move by means of our mud bumps.
We bubble as do the dead but more slowly.
The products of excruciating purgeswe are squeezed out thin hard and dry.
If we exude a stench it is petrified sainthood.

Beards of water
some of them have.
Others are blowing whistles of water.
Faces astonished that constant water

Women
Or they should be
should be
pedestals

She sat on a shelf, her breasts two bellies on her poked-out belly, on which the navel looked like a sucked-in mouth— her knees bent and apart, her long left arm raised, with the large hand knuckled to a bar in the ceiling— her right hand…

Body my housemy horse my houndwhat will I dowhen you are
Where will I
How will I
What will I

What does love look like?
We knowthe shape of death.
Death is a cloudimmense and awesome.
At first a lidis lifted from the eye of light:

The flag is folded lengthwise, and lengthwise again, folding toward the open edge, so that the union of stars on the blue field remains outward in full view; a triangular folding is then begun at the striped end, by bringing the corner of the…

I like being in your apartment, and not disturbing anything.
As in the woods I wouldn't want to move a tree,
or change the play of sun and shadow on the ground.
The yellow kitchen stool belongs right thereagainst white…

In the pond in the parkall things are doubled;
Long buildings hang andwriggle gently. Chimneysare bent legs bouncingon clouds below. A flagwags like a fishhookdown there in the sky.
The arched stone bridgeis an eye, with underlidin the…

The popcorn is greasy, and I forgot to bring a Kleenex.
A pill that’s a bomb inside the stomach of a man
The Embassy blows up.
Eructations of flame, luxuriouscauliflowers giganticize into motion.

A smudge for the horizon that, on a clear day, shows the hard edge of hills and buildings on the other coast.
Anchored boats all head one way: north, where the wind comes from.
You can see the storm inflating out of the west.
A…

“Feel me to do right,” our father said on his deathbed.
We did not quite know—in fact, not at all—what he meant.
His last whisper was spent as through a slot in a wall.
He left us a key, but how did it fit? “Feel me to do right.”…

When in the mask of night there shone that cut,
we were riddled.
A probe reached downand stroked some nerve in us,
as if the glint from a wizard's eye, of silver

I show her how to put her arms around me, but she’s much too small.
What’s worse, she doesn’t understand.
And although she lies beside me, sticking out her tongue, it’s herself she licks.
She likes my stroking hand.

Stop bleeding
said the knife I would if I
could said the cut.
Stop bleeding