Precipitations | Page 6

point of
obscenity.
My breasts shrivel,
The nipples drawn like withered plums
To the
eyes of the bright young nurse.
I am nothing but a dull eye myself,

An eye out of a socket,
Bursting,
Contorted with hideous wisdom.
Eye to eye
We fight in the death throes,
Myself and the young nurse.

Her firm, crisp aproned bosom
Leans toward the bed,
As she
smooths the rumpled pillow back
With long cool fingers.
HOSPITAL NIGHT
I am Will-o'-the-Wisp.
I float in a little pool of delirium,

Phosphorescent velvet.
My fire is like a breath
That blows my
illness in circles,
Widening it so far
That I cannot see the edge.
It
is one with the night sky.
My fire has blown this vastness,
But I
strain and flicker trying to escape from it.
I want to exist without the

darkness
That makes my breath so bright.
I want the morning to
thin my light.
DOMESTIC CANTICLE
SPRING SONG
Sap crashes suddenly through dead roots:
Sap that bites,
Harsh,

Impatient,
Bitter as gold.
My God, my sisters, how dark, how silent, how heavy is earth!
Shoulders strain against this eternity,
Against the trickling loam.

Earth dropped on the heart like a nerveless hand:
On the red mouth

Earth coils,
Heavy as a serpent.
Light has come back to the
darkness,
To the shadow,
To the coolness of blackened leaves.
HOME AGAIN
Where I used to be
I could hear the sea.
The black ragged palm
fronds flung themselves against
the twilight sky.
The moon stared up from the water like a fish's eye.

I had the loneliness that sings.
It made me light and gave me
wings.
Is it the dust and the iron railings and the blank red brick That makes
me sick?
There is no space to be lonely any more
And crumbling
feet on a city street
Sound past the door.
TO A SICK CHILD
At the end of the day
The sun rusts.
The street is old and quiet.

The houses are of iron.
The shadows are iron.
Shrill screams of
children scrape the iron sky.
Let us lock ourselves in the light.
Let
the sun nail us to the hot earth with his spikes of fire, And perhaps
when the darkness rushes past
It will forget us.

LOVE SONG
(To C. K. S.)
Little father,
Little mother,
Little sister,
Little brother,
Little
lover,
How can I go on living
With you away from me?
How can I get up in the morning
And go to bed at night,
And you
not here?
How can I bear the sunrise and the sunset,
And the
moonrise and the moonset,
And the flowers in the garden?
How can I bear them,
You,
My little father,
Little mother,
Little
sister,
Little brother,
Little lover?
QUARREL
Abruptly, from a wall of clear cold silence
Like an icy glass,

Myself looked out at me
And would not let me pass.
I wanted to
reach you
Before it was too late;
But my frozen image barred the
way
With vacant hate.
MY CHILD
Tentacles thrust imperceptibly into the future
Helplessly sense the
fire.
A serpentine nerve
Impelled to lengthen itself generation after
generation
Pierces the labyrinth of flames
To rose-colored
extinction.
THE TUNNEL
I
I have made you a child in the womb,
Holding you in sweet and final
darkness.
All day as I walk out
I carry you about.
I guard you
close in secret where
Cold eyed people cannot stare.
I am melted in
the warm dear fire,
Lover and mother in the same desire.

Yet I am

afraid of your eyes
And their possible surprise.
Would you be angry
if I let you know
That I carried you so?
II
I could kiss you to death
Hoping that, your protest obliterated,
You
would be
Utterly me.
Yet I know--how well!--
Like a shell,

Hollow and echoing,
Death would be,
With a roar of the past
Like
the roar of the sea.
And what is lifeless I cannot kill!
So you would
make death work your will.
III
In most intimate touch we meet,
Lip to lip,
Breast to breast,
Sweet.

Suddenly we draw apart
And start.
Like strangers surprised at a
road's turning
We see,
I, the naked you;
You, the naked me.

There was something of neither of us
That covered the hours,
And
we have only touched each other's bodies
Through veils of flowers.

But let us smile kindly,
Like those already dead,
On the warm flesh

And the marriage bed.
IV
The blanched stars are withered with light.
The moon is pale with
trying to remember something.
Light, straining for a stale birth,

Distends the darkness.
I, in the midst of this travail,
Bring forth--
The solitude is so vast
I
am glad to be freed of it.
Is it the moon I see there,
Or does my own
white face
Hang in blank agony against the sky
As if blinded with
giving?
V
Little inexorable lips at my breast
Drink me out of me
In a fine
sharp stream.
Little hands tear me apart
To find what they need.

I am weak with love of you,
Little body of hate!
BRUISED SUNLIGHT
WATER MOODS
RAIN ON THE SEASHORE
Curling petals of rain lick silver tongues.
Fluffy spray is blown
loosely up between thin silver lips
And slithers, tinkling in hard green
ice, down the gray rocks.
White darkness--
An expressionless horizon stares with stone eyes.

The sea lifts its immense self heavily
And falls down in sickly might.
The emptiness is like a death of which no one shall ever know.
SHIP MASTS
They stand
Stark as church spires;
Bare stalks
That will