FINAL SOLILOQUY OF THE INTERIOR PARAMOUR
Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one [...]
TO PURITY
I have heard so much about you
if you claim to be you I will know it’s not true
if you say nothing I will listen as I do with my own old mixed feelings of hope and reservation
hearing through them whatever might be you
the way I see the white [...]
FOG
A vagueness comes over everything, as though proving color and contour alike dispensable: the lighthouse extinct, the islands’ spruce-tips drunk up like milk in the universal emulsion; houses reverting into the lost and forgotten; granite subsumed, a rumor in a mumble of ocean. Tactile definition, however, has not been totally banished: [...]
NOW WINTER NIGHTS ENLARGE
Now winter nights enlarge This number of their hours; And clouds their storms discharge Upon the airy towers. Let now the chimneys blaze And cups o’erflow with wine, Let well-tuned words amaze With harmony divine. Now yellow waxen lights Shall wait on honey love While [...]
COLD MORNING
Through an accidental crack in the curtain I can see the eight o’clock light change from charcoal to a faint gassy blue, inventing things
in the morning that has a thick skin of ice on it as the water tank has, so nothing flows, all is bone, telling its tale of how [...]
WORDS AND THE DIMINUTION OF ALL THINGS
The brief secrets are still here, and the light has come back. The word remember touches my hand, But I shake it off and watch the turkey buzzards bank and wheel Against the occluded sky. All of the little names sink down, weighted with what [...]
NEVER GIVE ALL THE HEART
Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss; For everything that’s lovely is But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright, [...]
DRAWING FROM LIFE
Look: I am building absence out of this room’s air, I’m reading suppositions into summer’s script snarled on a varnished floor. It looks like a man. That knot’s his hand waving good-bye, that stippled stripe of grain’s the stacked-up vertebrae of his turned back. Small birds (sparrows or finches, or perhaps) [...]
SLEEP DOOR
a light knocking on the sleep door like the sound of a rope striking the side of a boat
heard underwater boats pulling up alongside each other
beneath the surface we rub up against each other will we capsize in
the surge and silence of waking from sleep
you are a lost [...]
MAY DAY
I’ve decided to waste my life again, Like I used to: get drunk on The light in the leaves, find a wall Against which something can happen,
Whatever may have happened Long ago—let a bullet hole echoing The will of an executioner, a crevice In which a love note was hidden,
Be [...]