Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,A song to fall like water on my head,And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!There is a magic made by melody:A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and coolHeart, that…
to take a walk on that long beachEverything was withdrawn as far as possible,indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,seabirds in ones or twos.The rackety, icy, offshore windnumbed our faces on one side;disrupted the formationof a lone flight of Canada geese;and blew back the low, inaudible rollersin upright, steely mist.The sky was darker than…
the house we live in,beneath the magnetic rock,rain-, rainbow-ridden,where blood-blackbromelias, lichens,owls, and the lintof the waterfalls cling,familiar, unbidden.In a dim ageof waterthe brook sings loudfrom a rib cageof giant fern; vaporclimbs up the thick growtheffortlessly, turns back,holding them both,house and rock,in a private cloud.At night, on the roof,blind drops crawland the ordinary brownowl gives us…
The little dog next door barks in his sleepinquiringly, just once.Perhaps in his sleep, too, the bird inquiresonce or twice, quavering.Questions—if that is what they are—answered directly, simply,by day itself.Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous;gray light streaking each bare branch,each single twig, along one side,making another tree, of glassy veins…The bird still sits there. Now he seems…
Tended by Faustinayes in a crazy houseupon a crazy bed,frail, of chipped enamel,blooming above her headinto four vaguely roselikeflower-formations,the white woman whispers toherself. The floorboards sagthis way and that. The crookedtowel-covered tablebears a can of talcumand five pasteboard boxesof little pills,most half-crystallized.The visitor sits and watchesthe dew glint on the screenand in it two glow-wormsburning…
The poor who come to RioAnd can’t go home again.On the hills a million people,A million sparrows, nest,Like a confused migrationThat’s had to light and rest,Building its nests, or houses,Out of nothing at all, or air.You’d think a breath would end them,They perch so lightly there.But they cling and spread like lichen,And people come and…
with his eyes fast closed.The sails fall away below himlike the sheets of his bed,leaving out in the air of the night the sleeper’s head.Asleep he was transported there,asleep he curledin a gilded ball on the mast’s top,or climbed insidea gilded bird, or blindly seated himself astride.‘I am founded on marble pillars,’said a cloud. ‘I…
And then it stops and undertakes to answerin the same tone of voice.No one could tell the difference.Uninnocent, these conversations start,and then engage the senses,only half-meaning to.And then there is no choice,and then there is no sense;until a nameand all its connotation are the same.
to keep her dentist’s appointmentand sat and waited for herin the dentist’s waiting room.It was winter. It got darkearly. The waiting roomwas full of grown-up people,arctics and overcoats,lamps and magazines.My aunt was insidewhat seemed like a long timeand while I waited and readthe National Geographic(I could read) and carefullystudied the photographs:the inside of a volcano,black,…
where some ship saw an island being born:at first a breath of steam, ten miles away;and then a black fleck—basalt, probably—rose in the mate’s binocularsand caught on the horizon like a fly.They named it. But my poor old island’s stillun-rediscovered, un-renamable.None of the books has ever got it right.Well, I had fifty-twomiserable, small volcanoes I…
