everything the same, down to the meadow,but with a bed added.Everything the same, including sunlight,because it would be hard on a young girlto go so quickly from bright light to utter darknessGradually, he thought, he’d introduce the night,first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.Let Persephone get used…
The ecstatic reds of the roses,So that you will come to it with your lovers.And the willows–See how it has shaped these greenTents of silence. YetThere is still something you need,Your body so soft, so alive, among the stone animals.Admit that it is terrible to be like them,Beyond harm.
my grandmother taught all her daughters.Midsummer: too hot to go out.Today, my aunt’s ahead; she’s getting the good cards.My mother’s dragging, having trouble with her concentration.She can’t get used to her own bed this summer.She had no trouble last summer,getting used to the floor. She learned to sleep thereto be near my father.He was dying;…
Sleep in their blue yoke,The fields having beenPicked clean, the sheavesBound evenly and piled at the roadsideAmong cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:This is the barrennessOf harvest or pestilenceAnd the wife leaning out the windowWith her hand extended, as in payment,And the seedsDistinct, gold, callingCome hereCome here, little oneAnd the soul creeps out of the…
I hear the bone diceOf blown gravel clicking. Bone-pale, the recent snowFastens like fur to the river.Standstill. We were leaving to deliverChristmas presents when the tire blewLast year. Above the dead valves pines paredDown by a storm stood, limbs bared . . .I want you.
The sun was shining. The dogswere sleeping at her feet where time was also sleeping,calm and unmoving as in all photographs.I wiped the dust from my mother’s face.Indeed, dust covered everything; it seemed to me the persistenthaze of nostalgia that protects all relics of childhood.In the background, an assortment of park furniture, trees and shrubbery.The…
lying all day, then all night in the narrow bed,sleeping there, eating there too: it was summer,it seemed everything had ripenedat once. And so hot we lay completely uncovered.Sometimes the wind rose; a willow brushed the window.But we were lost in a way, didn’t you feel that?The bed was like a raft; I felt us…
sweetness came out, soundlike a silver light aroundthe cherry bough. Butthe dove wasn’t satisfied.It saw the villagersgathered to listen underthe blossoming tree.It didn’t think: Iam higher that they are.It wanted to wealk among them,to experience the violence of human feeling,in part for its song’s sake.So it became human.It found passion, it found violence,first conflated, thenas…
The little ones, the babies–theseshe rocks, whispering or singing quietly. I can’t saywhat she did for my father;whatever it was, I’m sure it was right.It’s the same thing, really, preparing a personfor sleep, for death. The lullabies–they all saydon’t be afraid, that’s how they paraphrasethe heartbeat of the mother.So the living grow slowly calm; it’s…
swans lived. As swans,they spent eighty percent of the day studyingthemselves in the attentive water andtwenty percent ministering to the belovedother. Thustheir fame as lovers stemschiefly from narcissism, which leavesso little leisure formore general cruising. Butfate had other plans: after ten years, they hitslimy water; whatever the filth was, itclung to the male’s plumage, which…
