Aubade

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until...

A love poem or song welcoming or lamenting the arrival of the dawn.

I want to sleep with you elbow to elbow
Hair entwined
Genitals enlaced
With your mouth as a pillow.
I want to sleep with you back to back
Without breath to keep us apart
Without words to distract us
Without eyes to tell lies
Without clothes.
I want to...

Buzzards figure-eight
over browned pampas, stalk whiffs
of beheaded cane’s
corpses in spindly, bare limbs.
Full, we spoon, milk noon’s languor.

Almost nothing has changed
about the world. We're still bound
to go on having this hunch

everything has left us or is waiting
for the worst possible moment to do so. 
It's still our custom as a people

to measure our lives by our longing,
our longing...

Sometimes I pronounce aubade: obeyed
for the way this particular desire stumbles
the tongue. Hunger’s vocabulary is a fickle

thing. How many lovers have said that
they adore me, but meant instead they saw
in me a door? A thing to be entered. Language

shifts an...

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.   
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.   
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.   
Till then I see what’s really always there:   
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,   
Making all thought impossible but how   
And...

The big doll being broken and the sawdust fall
all scattered by my shoes, not crying
I sit in my dark to discover o failure annulled
opens out in my hands a purse of golden
salvaged sovereigns, from floors of seas culled.

The dancing doll...

The snow voids the distance of the road
and the first breath comes from the early morning
ghosts. The sparrows with their hard eyes
glisten in the difficult light. They preen
their feathers and chirp. It’s as though they were one
voice talking to God.
                                   ...

A wound is a blossom
but only to the living.
A May night, birdsong

before the first light pierces,
chirps out of blackness:
My daughter's angry at me

and her mother as I
was once angry at mine.
It's a way of crossing over.

I'm so tired now.
And my...

Scintillas of the anatomical
on the vines, buds opening—
make me a figure
for the woken.
 
On the vines, buds opening—
blue, little throats.
For the woken,
this different tin sky.
 
Blue, little throats
speak to me in the right voice.
This different tin sky,
the playground thawing.
 
Speak to me in...

            Milkflower petals on the street
                                                     like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright ...

He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.
            Open, he says.
                                        She opens.
                                                      Outside, a soldier spits out
            his cigarette...

the desire to show is destruction
in lessons forgot before learned
no shrunken heads hang by wires
no mourning songs of half-remembered
shutters open the width of an eyelash
it is enough for vision to run
its finger along, for access to steal
from forbidden shores the...

I know my leaving in the breakfast table mess.   
Bowl spills into bowl: milk and bran, bread crust   
crumbled. You push me back into bed.

More “honey” and “baby.”
Breath you tell my ear circles inside me,   
curls a damp wind and runs the circuit   
of...

Lathe of the ocean. Perpetual
Motion machine of the waves. Everything still
Being turned and shaped to a shape nobody
Foresees: Ten years ago, was it, when we
 
Walked that shore, too earnest and sheepish
To hold hands? The wind cutting through our clothes
Cleansed and...

‘Tis true, ‘tis day, what though it be?
O wilt thou therefore rise from me?
Why should we rise because ‘tis light?
Did we lie down because ‘twas night?
Love, which in spite of darkness brought us hither,
Should in...

I do not know where either of us can turn
Just at first, waking from the sleep of each other.
I do not know how we can bear
The river struck by the gold plummet of the moon,
Or many...

Yellow pines    No ever    no green    except
where stems brown needles green    I walk

on the wooden train    The fall’s water you swam in
one cold morning    What you braved    That ice

path    A horse fence    Where fences are horses
with long hair    I braid...

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim:
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.

I. AUBADE

The dawn is here—and the long night through I have never seen thy face,
Though my feet have worn the patient grass at the gate of thy dwelling-place.

While the white moon sailed till, red in the west, it found the...