Precipitations | Page 5

the moon.
EMBARKATION OF CYTHERA
Like jellied flowers?My inflated curves?Melt in the peaceful stagnance of the bath.?If I were to die?I would resist the final agony?With only a faint quiver?From my escaping thighs.
CHRISTIAN LUXURIES
The red fountain of shame gushes up from my heart.?I throw back my long hair and the fountain floats it out?Like a fiery fan.?My wide stretched arms are white coral branches.?The liquid shadows seek between my amber breasts.
But the fire is cool.?It cannot burn me.
NARROW FLOWERS
I am a gray lily.?My roots are deep.?I cannot lift my hands?For one thin yellow butterfly.?Yet last night I grew up to a star.?My shade swirled mistily?Seven mountains high.?I lifted my face to another face.?The moon made a burning shadow on my brow.?Washed by the light,?My sharp breasts silvered.?My dance was an arc of mist?From west to east.
EYES
There are arms of ice around me,?And a hand of ice on my heart.?If they should come to bury me?I would not flinch or start.?For eyes are freezing me--?Eyes too cold for hate.?I think the ground,?Because it is dark,?A warmer place to wait.
AFTER YOUTH
Oh, that mysterious singing sadness of youth!?Exotic colors in the lamplit darkness of wet streets,?Musk and roses in the twilight,?The moon in the park like a golden balloon...
Then to awaken and find the shadows fled,?The music gone...?Empty, bleak!?My soul has grown very small and shriveled in my body.?It no longer looks out.?It rattles around,?And inside my body it begins to look,?Staring all around inside my body,?Like a crab in a crevice,?Staring with bulging eyes?At the strange place in which it finds itself.
THE SHADOW THAT WALKS ALONE
The silence tugs at my breast?With formless lips,?Like a heavy baby,?Attenuates me,?Draws me through myself into it.?I sit in the womb of an idiot,?Helpless before its mouthing tenderness.?The huge flap ears are attentive,?And the soundless face bends toward me?In horrible lovingness.
BIBLE TRUTH
To die...?Oh, cool river!?To float there with nothing to resist--
One ripple of silence spreads out from another.?My spirit widens so,?Circle beyond circle.?I hold up the stars no longer with the pupils of my eyes.?Hands, legs, arms float off from me.?I melt like flakes of snow.
I am no more opposed.?I am no more.
THE MATERNAL BREAST
I walked straight and long,?But I never found you.?I was looking for a hill of a hundred breasts,?A hill modeled after the statues of Diana of the Ephesians. I was looking for a hill of mounds hairy with grass,?And a place to lie down.
AIR FOR G STRING
White hands of God?With fingers like strong twigs flowering?Rock me in leaves of iron,?Leaves of blue.
Hands of God?Fashioned of clouds?Have finger tips that balance the almond white moon.?The pale sky is a flower?White tipped and pink tipped with dawn.?White hands of God gather the blossoms with fingers that hold me, Cloud fingers like milk in the azure night,?Weaving strong chords.
DESTINY
I am lost in the vast cave of night.?No sound but the far-off tinkle of stars,?And the cry of a bird?Muffled in shadows.
The light flows in remotely?Through the hollow moon,?Dim strange brilliance?From waters beyond the sky.?Groping,?I listen to the harsh tinkle of the far-off stars,?Feel the clammy shadows about my shoulders.
THE RED CROSS
HECTIC
I
Ruby winged pains flash through me,?Jewel winged agonies:?They vanish,?Carrying me with them?Without my knowing it.
II
Pain sends out long tentacles?And sucks.?When I have given up struggling?He takes me into his arms.
ISOLATION WARD
We are the separate centers of consciousness?Of all the universes.?We vibrate statically on a trillion golden wires.?Our trillion golden fingers twine in the weltering darkness, And grasp tremblingly,?Aware in agony?Of the things we can never know.
THE RED CROSS
Antiseptic smells that corrode the nostrils?Crumble me,?Eat me deep;?And my garments disintegrate:?First my nightgown,?Leaving my naked arms and legs disjointed,?Sprawled about the bed in postures meaningless to the 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