dolor
- I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
- Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
- All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
- Desolation in immaculate public places,
- Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
- The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
- Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
- Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.
- And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
- Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
- Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
- Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
- Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.
in a dark time
- In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
- I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
- I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
- A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
- I live between the heron and the wren,
- Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
- What's madness but nobility of soul
- At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
- I know the purity of pure despair,
- My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
- That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
- Or a winding path? The edge is what I have.
- A steady storm of correspondences!
- A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
- And in broad day the midnight come again!
- A man goes far to find out what he is--
- Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
- All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
- Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
- My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
- Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
- A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
- The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
- And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
the minimal
- I study the lives on a leaf: the little
- Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions,
- Beetles in caves, newts, stone-deaf fishes,
- Lice tethered to long limp subterranean weeds,
- Squirmers in bogs,
- And bacterial creepers
- Wriggling through wounds
- Like elvers in ponds,
- Their wan mouths kissing the warm sutures,
- Cleaning and caressing,
- Creeping and healing.
the storm
- Against the stone breakwater,
- Only an ominous lapping,
- While the wind whines overhead,
- Coming down from the mountain,
- Whistling between the arbors, the winding terraces;
- A thin whine of wires, a rattling and flapping of leaves,
- And the small street-lamp swinging and slamming against
- the lamp pole.
- Where have the people gone?
- There is one light on the mountain.
- Along the sea-wall, a steady sloshing of the swell,
- The waves not yet high, but even,
- Coming closer and closer upon each other;
- A fine fume of rain driving in from the sea,
- Riddling the sand, like a wide spray of buckshot,
- The wind from the sea and the wind from the mountain contending,
- Flicking the foam from the whitecaps straight upward into the darkness.
- A time to go home!--
- And a child's dirty shift billows upward out of an alley,
- A cat runs from the wind as we do,
- Between the whitening trees, up Santa Lucia,
- Where the heavy door unlocks,
- And our breath comes more easy--
- Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs over us, over
- The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts, beating
- The walls, the slatted windows, driving
- The last watcher indoors, moving the cardplayers closer
- To their cards, their anisette.
- We creep to our bed, and its straw mattress.
- We wait; we listen.
- The storm lulls off, then redoubles,
- Bending the trees half-way down to the ground,
- Shaking loose the last wizened oranges in the orchard,
- Flattening the limber carnations.
- A spider eases himself down from a swaying light-bulb,
- Running over the coverlet, down under the iron bedstead.
- Water roars into the cistern.
- We lie closer on the gritty pillow,
- Breathing heavily, hoping--
- For the great last leap of the wave over the breakwater,
- The flat boom on the beach of the towering sea-swell,
- The sudden shudder as the jutting sea-cliff collapses,
- And the hurricane drives the dead straw into the living pine-tree.
the reckoning
- All profits disappear: the gain
- Of ease, the hoarded, secret sum;
- And now grim digits of old pain
- Return to litter up our home.
- We hunt the cause of ruin, add,
- Subtract, and put ourselves in pawn;
- For all our scratching on the pad,
- We cannot trace the error down.
- What we are seeking is a fare
- One way, a chance to be secure:
- The lack that keeps us what we are,
- The penny that usurps the poor.