Generous instinct, were you
My hand I must
Think. The later brain.
My hands craving every
Learned heart. Nature, art,
World. In my memories
I thought of trust
Then all fear. I
Fell on my pain.
Hope shall in loss
Throb. My, my, my
Stand for the release.
A nation’s groan beneath
Dear night. All right.
I, sobbing in the rolling mist,
Started for peopled days. In dreams
A faded, lonely promontory shed petals.
Belief exists. Cunning with its perfume
Working from youth, defiance. A phantom
Vanished. The swift surrenders, leap into
The old dead heart of lies.
I will give, remembering my turns
Into foliage. Of what light unseen!
What, what, what, what, what, what
Will hold still without its end?
Gravel path stirred by the rain
fallen hard through the sweetgum trees,
path that leads to the bend
where the trail splits open in air:
Everything is lighted evenly.
It is a queer hour. The difference
between light and shadow
is the jealousy turn in the eye.
The sun is all in the bottle cap
that glints in the silt like a djinn’s brass hilt,
in the way some lea is frozen unto the air,
some warm leaf heavywet here, and in how, just there:
The strangeness strangely passes.
And evening mounts.
I can’t get the life out of my head.
There is no glamour on this path
but if I return I will find it
in the thought of how I looked for some.
I stoop to look at the veins that sweep
like Latin roots in the satin of things, dream:
The difference between something and nothing,
which is nothing.
The gravel lies on itself like dust lies on water.
No, no, there are no mothers here.
I bend to see it all, the little stones cast-wise.
Things chase themselves away from the mode of things.
I find a quartz, milked clear:
I could not hear its accent if it sang,
no matter how far off it formed.
What dead hand I should feel if I lifted it.
Has it turned out we’ve wasted our time?
We’ve wasted our time.
Our magnificent bodies on the dissecting table.
Our day after tomorrow.
Our what to do now.
The stink of us so undignified.
The end game of bloom.
We will lose the sun
struck and disassembled
lightly down and crawling like a worm.
This earth it is a banquet and laid on its table we.
A puncture in the wound room, crude and obvious.
The raving lunatics they are upon us,
but we are raving too.