Precipitations | Page 6

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 blossom?(Tomorrow perhaps)?Into flowers of the wind.
MONOCHROME
Gray water,?Gray sky drifting down to the sea.?The night,?Old, ugly, and stern,?Lies upon the water,?Quivering in the twilight?Like a tortured belly.
ANTIQUE
Clouds flung back?Make fan-shaped rays of faded crimson?Brocaded on dim blue satin;?Through the wrinkled dust-blue water?The little boat?Glides above its sunken shadow.
ECHO LOOKS AT HERSELF
The ship passes in the night?And drags jagged reflections?Like gilded combs?Through the obscure water.?Spun glass daisies float on a gold-washed mirror.
SPELL
In the dark I can hear the patter.?Bare white feet are running across the water.?White feet as bright as silver?Are flashing under dull blue dresses.?Wet palms beat,?Impatiently,?Petulantly,?Slapping the wet rocks.
HUNGRY SHADOWS
RAINY TWILIGHT
Dim gold faces float in the windows.?Dim gold faces and gilded arms...?They are clinging along the silver ladders of rain;?They are climbing with ivory lamps held high,?Starry lamps?Over which the silver ladders?Thicken into nets of twilight.
THE STORM
Herds of black elephants,?Rushing over the plains,?Trample the stars.?The ivory tusk of the leader?(Or is it the moon?)?Flashes, and is gone.?Tree tops bend;?Crash;?Fire from hoofs;?And still they rush on,?Trampling the stars,?Bellowing,?Roaring.
NYMPHS
The drift of shadows on the mountainside,?Blue and purple gold!?Purple dust sifting through fingers of ivory:?Cool purple on ivory breasts.?I see arms and breasts,?Upturned chins,?Slanting through the dust of purple leaves:?Ivory and gold,?Bare breasts and laughing eyes,?That drift on the shadowy surf?And surge against the side of the mountain.
WINTER DAWN
Cloudy dawn flower unfolds;?Moon moth gyrates slowly;?Snow maiden lets down her hair,?And in one shining silence,?It slips to earth.
THE