crossing the water
- Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.
- Where do the black trees go that drink here?
- Their shadows must cover Canada.
- A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
- Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:
- They are round and flat and full of dark advice.
- Cold worlds shake from the oar.
- The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.
- A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;
- Stars open among the lilies.
- Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
- This is the silence of astounded souls.
mirror
- I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
- Whatever I see I swallow immediately
- Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
- I am not cruel, only truthful,
- The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
- Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
- It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
- I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
- Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
- Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
- Searching my reaches for what she really is.
- Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
- I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
- She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
- I am important to her. She comes and goes.
- Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
- In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
- Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
i am vertical
- But I would rather be horizontal
- I am not a tree with my root in the soil
- Sucking up minerals and motherly love
- So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
- Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
- Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
- Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
- Compared with me, a tree is immortal
- And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
- And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.
- Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
- The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors
- I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
- Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
- I must most perfectly resemble them-
- Thoughts gone dim.
- It is more natural to me, lying down.
- Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
- And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
- Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have
- time for me.
stillborn
- These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.
- They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
- Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
- If they missed out on walking about like people
- It wasn't for any lack of mother love.
- O I cannot understand what happend to them!
- They are proper in shape and number in every part.
- They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
- They smile and smile and smile and smile at me.
- And still the lungs won't fill and the heart won't start.
- They are not pigs, they are not even fish,
- Though they have a piggy and fishy air-
- It would be better if they were alive, and that's what they were.
- But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction,
- And they stupidly stare, and do not speak of her.
small hours
- Empty, I echo to the least footfall,
- Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas.
- In my courtyard a fountain leaps and sinks back into itself,
- Nun-hearted and blind to the world. Marble lilies
- Exhale their pallor like scent.
- I imagine myself with a great public,
- Mother of a white Nike and several bald-eyed Apollos.
- Instead, the dead injure me with attentions, and nothing
- can happen.
- The moon lays a hand on my forehead,
- Blank-faced and mum as a nurse.