ascending
the day meets your borders
so easily
where you have discovered it.
The Hero Leaves His Ship
I wonder if this new reality is going to destroy me.
There under the leaves a loaf
The brick wall on it someone has put bananas
The bricks have come loose under the weight,
What a precarious architecture these apartments,
As giants once in a garden. Dear roots
Your slivers repair my throat when anguish
commences to heat and glow.
From the water
A roar. The sea has its own strong wrist
The green turf is made of shells
it is new.
I am about to use my voice
Why am I afraid that salty wing
Flying over a real hearth will stop me?
Yesterday the yellow
Tokening clouds. I said “no” to my burden,
The shrub planted on my shoulders. When snow
Falls or in rain, birds gather there
In the short evergreen. They repeat their disastrous
Beckoning songs as if the earth
Were rich and many warriors coming out of it,
As if the calm was blue, one sky over
A shore and the tide welcoming a fleet
Bronzed and strong as breakers,
Their limbs in this light
Fused of sand and wave are lifted once
Then sunk under aquamarine, the phosphorous.
Afterwards this soundless bay,
Gulls fly over it. The dark is mixed
With wings. I ask if that house is real,
If geese drink at the pond, if the goatherd takes
To the mountain, if the couple love and sup,
I cross the elemental stations
from windy field to still close. Good night I go to my bed.
This roof will hold me. Outside the gods survive.
Les Réalités
It’s raining today and I’m reading about pharmacies
in Paris.
Yesterday I took the autumn walk, known in May
as lovers’ walk.
Because I was overwhelmed by trees (the path from the playhouse
leads into a grove and beyond are the gravestones),
squirrels and new mold it is a good thing today
to read about second-class pharmacies where
mortar and plastic goods disturb death a little
and life more. It is as if perpetual rain
fell on those drugstores making the mosaic brighter,
as if entering those doors one’s tears
were cleaner.
As if I had just
left you and was looking for a new shade of powder
orchidée, ambre, rosé, one very clarified and true
to its owner, one that in a mirror
would pass for real and yet when your hand falls upon it
(as it can) changes into a stone or flower of the will
and triumphs as a natural thing,
as this pharmacy
turns our desire into medicines and revokes the rain.
In the Middle of the Easel
My darling, only
a cubist angle seen after
produces this volume in which our hearts go
(tick tick)
I see you in a veil of velvet
then I’m quiet because you’ve
managed the apples, you’ve arranged
to sit. You are twice clothed
in my joy, my nymph.
Painters who range up and down
Mont hill or Mont this, disarray
in the twilight those boulevards,
make every stroke count and when one of the Saints
(in the dark apse tonal) quits,
I’m with you.
Together we’ll breathe it,
you and I in the sleeve forgiving requiem,
in the priest tinted air.
In the gaslight that ridiculous plume
reminds me of hawks, I admire
their arc, I plunge
my everyday laughter into that kimono wing
what a studio soar! What rapture!
The gifted night, the billowing dark!
The heroine Paint sobs
“No one who has ever loved me
can tell me why
there are two birds at my wrist
and only one flies.”
On the Way to Dumbarton Oaks
The air! The colonial air! The walls, the brick,
this November thunder! The clouds Atlanticking,
Canadianing, Alaska snowclouds,
tunnel and sleigh, urban and mountain routes!
Chinese tree
your black branches and your three yellow leaves
with you I traffick. My three
yellow notes, my three yellow stanzas,
my three precisenesses
of head and body and tail joined
carrying my scroll, my tree drawing
This winter day I’m
a compleat travel agency with my Australian
aborigine sights, my moccasin feet padding
into museums where I’ll betray all my vast
journeying sensibility in a tear dropped before
“The Treasure of Petersburg”
and gorgeous this forever
I’ve a raft of you left over
like so many gold flowers and so many white
and the stems! the stems I have left!
Cape Canaveral
Fixed in my new