He play'd his wings as tho' for flight;
They webb'd the sky with glassy light.
His body sway'd upon tiptoes,
Like a wind-perplexed rose;
In eddies of the wind he went
At last up the blue element.

After months of silence, there comes a day
When I feel I can turn anything I wish to say
Into poetry. And they talk so much
About the discipline of being a poet,
Of setting up schedules for practicing the craft.
But look at us vagrants-the muse feeds us too,
And we too manage to scrape by.
So Ezekiel was right.
As it is with love, it must be with poetry:
Wait, wait, wait, and never force the pace.
Years vanish behind one, leaving only the debris
Of so many wasted afternoons with no sympathy,
No relief, no reward. Then the pain

(1)

Of my plight, I won't speak;
You have asked - so kind of you.

(2)

If it's not of pangs of love you are suffering,
why then you steal your glance
and bat your eyelids on meeting?

(3)

If you forget, it'll leave me heart-broken;
I'm but sure you'll fondly remember,
when I'm gone.

(4)

Earlier my eyes were tearful streams,
Mir, now these are just a desert!

(5)

How much low was my heart at night, Mir,
That all the words on my lips became a prayer.

It was our first great war
And after the first successful sortie
Into the nomansgland between her thighs
We waited anxiously every month
for poppysellers to appear in her streets

I want to write you
a love poem as headlong
as our creek
after thaw
when we stand
on its dangerous
banks and watch it carry
with it every twig
every dry leaf and branch
in its path
every scruple
when we see it
so swollen
with runoff
that even as we watch
we must grab
each other
and step back
we must grab each
other or
get our shoes
soaked we must
grab each other

Yours is the face that the earth turns to me,
Continuous beyond its human features lie
The mountain forms that rest against the sky.
With your eyes, the reflecting rainbow, the sun's light
Sees me; forest and flower, bird and beast
Know and hold me forever in the world's thought,
Creation's deep untroubled retrospect.

When your hand touches mine it is the earth
That takes me--the green grass,
And rocks and rivers; the green graves,
And children still unborn, and ancestors,
In love passed down from hand to hand from God.

Let us go out in the rain, love,
And keep these memories clean;
Then stand beneath the sheltering eave
To fall in love with the moon.

And let us walk in the wood, dear,
Walk in the stillness of pines,
And sigh for the wild birds who cry there
All night in their shuddering dreams.

Then back to our waiting house, sweet,
Four wars and a sturdy roof,
Where nothing can ever harm us -
No, not even grinning Death.

It's so nice
to wake up in the morning
all alone
and not have to tell somebody
you love them
when you don't love them
any more.

Speak earth and bless me with what is richest
make sky flow honey out of my hips
rigis mountains
spread over a valley
carved out by the mouth of rain.

And I knew when I entered her I was
high wind in her forests hollow
fingers whispering sound
honey flowed
from the split cup
impaled on a lance of tongues
on the tips of her breasts on her navel
and my breath
howling into her entrances
through lungs of pain.

Greedy as herring-gulls
or a child
I swing out over the earth
over and over
again.

There is always something to be made of pain.
Your mother knits.
She turns out scarves in every shade of red.
They were for Christmas, and they kept you warm
while she married over and over, taking you
along. How could it work,
when all those years she stored her widowed heart
as though the dead come back.
No wonder you are the way you are,
afraid of blood, your women
like one brick wall after another.