The whole city

You stand without trembling.Little mist of fallen starlight,Perfect, beyond my reach,How I envy you.For if you could only listen,I would tell you something,Something human.An old manAppeared to me onceIn the unendurable snow.He had a singe of whiteBeard on his face.He paused on a street in MinneapolisAnd stroked my face.Give it to me, he begged.I’ll pay…

Just offshore.I shiver a little, with the evening.I turn down the steep path to findWhat’s left of the river gold.I whistle a dog lazily, and lazilyA bird whistles me.Close by a big river, I am alive in my own country,I am home again.Yes: I lived here, and here, and my name,That I carved young, with…

Running to spare his suffering, I forgotMy name, my number, how my day began,How soldiers milled around the garden stoneAnd sang amusing songs; how all that dayTheir javelins measured crowds; how I aloneBargained the proper coins, and slipped away.Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my ropeAside, I…

Flopped like a fish against the muddy ground.Beany, the kid whose yellow hair turns green,Told me to find you, even if the rain,And tell you he was drowned.I hid behind the chassis on the bank,The wreck of someone’s Ford:I was afraid to come and wake you drunk:You told me once the waking up was hard,The…

Be still.Now.There they are, the moon’s young, tryingTheir wings.Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadowOf her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is goneWholly, into the air.I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breatheOr move.I listen.The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,And I…

Slide down the hill, rise again, and buildEerie little dunes on the roof of the house.In the valley below me,Miles between me and the town of St.-Jeannet,The road lamps glow.They are so cold, they might as well be dark.Trucks and carsCough and drone down there between the goldenCoffins of greenhouses, the startled squawkOf a rooster…