A full cup has come to me, I cannot empty it. 
      In your unsteady hands you ferry it, half a globe 
      Full of suns that had run up to you mad as puppies. 
      Full of liquid geraniums melted at your touch. 
5     I drink and drink, but I cannot get drunk enough. 
      My head reels. My feet tango on the ceiling. 
      You have been looking at me a long time already. 
      Already, between your strong legs, a spring has darkened. 
      Lying with you, I am light as a moon-man, 
10    My silver umbilical moves like a rumor through the stars. 
      Tau Ceti seems so close, just over our shoulders. 
      What will our children remember about us? 
      Chance pulled us together with its rose lasso 
      But who had held its long comet's tail? 
15    Your eyes are a mischievous dower, your tears 
      Soak my chest and leave no stain. I wipe not one away. 
      Who is the guilty one when passion is strong enough to bruise, 
      Too weak to blink? Am I too afraid of losing sight of you, 
      The miraculous ghettos that hold souls in your hair, 
20    The tinted resonance of your shadow, where it has fallen?

      When first I put my dreams against the tide 
      And against all the world's whorl, 
      Woman's word and world's spray and all 
      Did first my dreams deride. 
5     O How long since my first dream had cried 
      'Abide, abide!' 
      When next I tided life's bitter wreck 
      And fingered the fathering ashes for mirth 
      As if the cursed grave alone saved worth 
10    Along all the drear shore's long dreck, 
      Even then my quiet dream sighed 
      'Abide, abide!' 
      Thirty years' work and little profit, 
      So greedy is the white spray's strain 
15    Rowmen must beat the oar and never ask for rest; 
      And when my burning arms unlock, 
      From their dry white sockets drop, 
      They surrender under a sigh: 
      O How long's silence since 
20    My first, flung dream had cried 
      'Abide, abide!'

      Sunset clouds in awakened eyes. Mysterious. 
      The day takes on what the night has dropped, 
      Everyday, as if it were only natural 
      To sink the things of darkness in so much light. 
5     Before me's the luminous landscape of your back, turned 
      To its solemn and human warmth, like a sky. 
      I leap up to the lightness. 
      I am trying to draw for you an archaic theater, 
      Old stones rolling to an ocean voice, cracked lines, 
10    But all I have so far are these inapt words. 
      The severe doric columns go under your eyelids, heavily. 
      Outside, March. Its universal brightness invades 
      All of my senses as I touch you, seeding brightness; 
      The devouring waters rush and whiten, so light, 
15    Trying to become the wind no one can see. 
      Speaking, ceasing, speaking. The light goes on inspiring 
      Tragic antlers in their brown clashes. I look, 
      Again, at you, lying there heavily as a good watermelon, 
      Trying my waters, leaping, leaping, loving you.

      Because you took me to bed, I love you. 
      Because your sex wraps around me 
      And my body falls out of myself 
      Like a flower, I love you. 
5     Wisdom doubles itself like a germ, 
      Adding body to body. Your eye 
      Adds itself to my eye, and we go on seeing. 
      New things, new newness. 
      Cicadas, windfall, our braiding bodies 
10    Tender, joyful, awake in each other,  
      Simple as forgetting. 
      A slow-crawl cross, holy and mossy. 
      Hesitant as a craving bee I explore you completely, 
      Exhausting the tassels of sunlight, 
15    Removing valuable essences even by the powdery moon. 
      And its lonely magnet unites us, crests us. 
      Stale and silly, 
      I return to the gorgeous orchard of your arms. 
      Your arms tensile and lively as if managing a sailboat. 
20    The heavy sail red, full of bloods, wombs. 
      But agile anyway in the universe that blows it 
      Before your face, in the front of the dawn 
      Your hair whipping!

      Body, body complete as a planet, our whole world 
      And no soul anywhere? Death, death complete 
      As a trainwreck, and no salvation from skeletons? 
      I stagger after your kisses that stagger away. 
5     A million miles of purgatory and no heaven to end it. 
      Collapsed loneliness, a black velvet hole. 
      When our hands touch like torches, all night, 
      What floss of wire in our heads signals there's Deity? 
      The spellchecker in my brother admits His existence. 
10    So why are all the gnats awake on my skin, 
      This volcanic island chain of doubts surrounding me? 
      Am I the only atheist to ever fall in love? 
      Without death, I would be content to kiss you hereafter. 
      Without death, your generation would be as water, 
15    Mere water, water from water, a wetness, nothing else.

      Vanity in the bough 
      Vanity in the briar, 
      So saith the preacher 
      And prays his prayer. 
5          God lies knotted in the bower. 
      Kisses, sweet messes and delight, 
      Sings the cold widow who lives by the bay, 
      On these my thoughts drink dry the day, 
      My hungry body feasts the night. 
10         God lies knotted in the bower. 
      Priest and widow one pulpit share 
      And body and soul are tight, 
      What one rasps to the empty air 
      The other laughs in the dark. 
15         God lies knotted in the bower.

      The crayon-crammed sun, dear, 
      Roaring and soundless, fountains 
      A crooked rivering stalk to the grave 
      For it is summer and never 
5     Among the milkweed floods of grass 
      Will everyday angels flame again 
      Dawn wise and luminous as thread 
      Out of the martian mysterious dark, 
      So tall was the flying sunshine  
10    Spied in your crinkled eyes. 
      The milky sun hung up the sour day 
      With daylong hands played the harp grasses  
      That plucked our praise-soaked ears 
      There on the floor of light 
15    For it was summer and ever 
      Our milk-licked unmanageable bones 
      Pounded joy and adoring down 
      The auroraed roughs of our breaths 
      Till silk-dripping souls announced 
20    Heaven commences at our fingertips. 
      Oh it was dawn and noon, and night 
      Dropped his forgotten trunk of darks 
      Among the staggered stars as I came, 
      The sun's brother, halogened as haloes 
25    Shining my wary wishes in the air 
      For it was summer come and never 
      In the pearly rivers of the grass, 
      Will I silk my grabbing eyes again 
      On the welcome-at-once loving 
30    Of your eiderdown sighing skin. 
      Now ambergris and matchless 
      The mirage-trod moon emerges like a tear 
      Over a mourning soul simple as sleep. 
      And because summer is overthrown 
35    And night has leapt up like a cat 
      Under the harp-tongued tree of cells 
      My vegetable hand now grows 
      Mannerly and large to grief: 
      O Time has denied me nothing 
40    Of his licorice whips and nickels 
      Nor eboned one nightfall or fastness 
      Shut on your ghost-wasted alien eyes. 
      Pulled by the spoken tide of the clock 
      At midnight moonless rest I writhe 
45    Resplendent in my bent vest of ribs 
      And hear both tomb and rumor tumbled dumb 
      By the mild handmaidens of your sighs 
      For it is summer gone and hollow 
      And sorrow's gone down with the moon 
50    And though I tongue earth's dust floods 
      For all those romancing eyes gone under 
      Fate's timeline is still the grass on fire 
      Burning where the wood was wild. 
      And the crumpled sun, broken, bears 
55    Funeral tears in the brain 
      That wombwise and graveward crawl 
      Down the fiery alcoholic face 
      For it was never summer or was it 
      Under my coal-thumbed universal eyes; 
60    And only the bigsouled sourceless moon 
      Drowned and void in the jailhouse dark 
      Remains and grieves derailed sighs 
      Over night-locked trees tall as grasses. 
      Do not grieve, brave, with whys 
65    Or hemorrhage one ear with a sigh; 
      No heavenhelp salves such ashes.   
      O Let instead the dear uncandled dead  
      Cry mercy up to my eyes.

      Tuneless bottles adumbrate the surf 
      Tumbled scuffed lines of water, angelus births, 
      Mammoth scarab portents... the sea disgorges 
      Venus and her tragic afterbirth; 
5     Blue sand catches trash. 
      Haphazard in the palmtree's rooted moonlight 
      I thunder vortexing flames, half-bright, 
      All-solemn, tipped in cymbal carib air 
      And shear my acid tears for the slow sky 
10    To advance by a single wasted page. 
      A green flash scolds, recharging time; 
      A coiled fire breaks 
      From the horizon's burning lime. 
      Claret's stripped indigenous light, 
15    Byzantine and exact, 
      Laps and smashes this island's coral banks 
      And Venus' weaving shoulders come, and come, 
      Fusing silted light in the surf's recanting drum, 
      And I am trapped in light. 
20    So imagination overtakes a death (my death) 
      And joy alone keeps pace.

      In our mutual, mortal 
      done undone, doing undoing 
      push me, pull you 
      racing to ruin 
5     past our curfew 
      laughing and cordial 
      we collapse together 
      and make our midnights burn 
      with a thousand torching 
10    touching suns, and when 
      the night clock is done 
      and old time runs 
      into new day begun 
      and cool spring is 
15    into hot summer come 
      in picnic weather 
      we tongue and fiddle 
      together breathless, apart 
      no better-- my heart! 
20    how we sweat to sighing 
      on sweet myrtle purple 
      and cry "no more,  
      we're sore!" and pant 
      like raced-out panthers 
25    at skies and ceilings 
      on our wringing backs-- 
      but like a turtle 
      we turn over 
      and swim some more 
30    with sheets for water. 
      Are we making sons 
      or daughters? "None 
      of wily neither!" and 
      we chorus laughter.

      Time's outrageous ghosts, griefs and sorrows 
      Rob stalwart hearts of their brave-faced tomorrows 
      And spasm us laughless toward joys unmet: 
      Agile life holds herself before us-- but not forever; 
5     We gasp to get the least departing glimmer of her. 
      So cursed, and crushing, and stiff is grief 
      We must lose ourselves if we lose pleasure. 
      Our own trying lives chafe from burning coal to dust; 
      We grind on to do, not as we would, but as we must. 
10    A wrecked auto, cancer's dark star, the tumor's bloom, 
      Seek us out on our various ledges; 
      We wander open-armed and upward-eyed, seeking edges.

      nailed longings 
               never told lovelier 
      in rainbow airs 
           a touched harp 
5             awaits vibrant 
         one dayshaft--- 
                 virulent loves! 
      closed eyes 
           shelter opalescence 
10    ---wonderaroused soaks 
             tongues' duotone 
                scarred redshifts sear 
                life's emblematic tracts

      Simple as sticks, we ignite. An algebra of skin 
      Commences with us; our aureoles vent longing. 
      The wind tears through our formulas and associations 
      Smearing the clean inks of our thought. 
5     We kiss like two erasers removing errors. 
      Blue parabolas disappear when you wash your eyeliner off. 
      Vectored cones triumph and crush me in your thighs 
      Full of the tragic strength birth requires. 
      You throw off your garlands. My heart incinerates them. 
10    We have played catch with the universe, reversed time. 
      Snapped the physicists' pencils, broken the old rules through. 
      You walk across the room from your mysterious center. 
      Or have I floated up from drowning to your face? 
      I look at the world the way a stockbroker looks at the paper; 
15    In you, consuming ecstasies. 
      In you, all drugs, all hybiscus' furiously blossom. 
      In you... my words find shallow resting, like dust, 
      As if restless doves still circulated the atmosphere. 
      I measure all things by your measurelessness. 
20    The stars, remote and faithless, shirr from your glance 
      In lonely sidelong birth, shivering in immensity 
      To have their long light, to have any light at all 
      Outside of your body. 
      Beside them, I, too, am shivering.

      Lenten spring has come to town 
      With blossoms the birds sing round, 
      That all this bliss bringeth; 
      Day's-eyes in his dales, 
5     Notes sweet of nightingales. 
      Each fowl his song singeth. 
      The thrush-cock threshes "oo." 
      Away is all their winter woe 
      When woodruff springeth. 
10    Sweet fowls are singing fairly fair 
      And wilt thus all their winter woe 
      While the woods ringeth. 
      The rose arises, wraps her robe; 
      The leaves in the light wood 
15    Wax all out with a will. 
      The moon demands her blue, oh; 
      The lily is lissome to see, oh, 
      The fennel and the chervil. 
      Wooing are the wild drakes; 
20    Mares merge with their mates 
      As the stream strikes still. 
      Moody songs, some; so do more! 
      I know I am one of those 
      For love must like me ill. 
25    The moon mandates her light; 
      So does the seemly sun so bright 
      When brides sing so bravely. 
      Dews dunk the dunes; 
      Deers with their dears run, 
30    So hearts within them dream; 
      Worms weave under clod; 
      Women wax wondrous proud, 
      So well the spring suits them. 
      If I should want my way with one 
35    This wondrous weal I will forego 
      And with the woods be done.

      Who had love right in world's history, 
      Love dowsered from stale books, old mythologies? 
      Who of all those mighty lovers once 
      Crossed unwatered that great stream? 
5     Or could tell when they woke, when they dreamed? 
      A woman lay by me in my bed; 
      Golden nights forgot days of lead, 
      And all my intricate subtlety was turned 
      Away, as if it had never burned 
10    With reality's cold questioning. 
      I call her image up that grew intense 
      Because so much of loveliness was struck condensed 
      Into those visionary, stone-still eyes 
      That knew the world must die away, 
15    That they themselves would never fade. 
      Beauty like that of a prideful bird, 
      Burnt-out memories blazed intense at a word, 
      All look upon me at my life's one work 
      To sit, grow still, and to never shirk 
20    This monstrous sublimity I feel. 
      I walk the long hallway questioning; 
      Questioning, I turn from thing to thing 
      An arrogant, restless mind 
      That I am tied to, kind to kind, 
25    A stone leashed to a stone.

      Lip to lip and hand to hand we meet 
      Where wet moon drives down to drown,--- 
      Eyes blown wide when the lightning strike 
      Silks terror to the ground. 
5     Come away, love, court the storm  
      Our nights lay wrapped with the worm. 
      Say this tempest tempts me now 
      Who did not love's thought invent, 
      Nor I the one shall ever finish it, 
10    Though it pull at the whirl of my brow. 
      Come away, love, court the storm  
      Our nights lay wrapped with the worm. 
      Say that lightning the night pulls down 
      Crosses like two hearts in love; 
15    Which rich greatness first had the name 
      The other must content to be emblem of? 
      Come away, love, court the storm  
      Our nights lay wrapped with the worm. 
      All night your hand blazes where it had slept; 
20    Midnight's undone, and our kisses heap,--- 
      For in the spirit we are tried and kept 
      And from spirit to spirit leap. 
      Come away, love, court the storm  
      Our nights lay wrapped with the worm. 
25    O Love where's comfort, where's land, where's sea, 
      That touches not the nothing of your hand? 
      I am all things where all things meet 
      In the original of your eye. 
      Come away, love, court the storm  
30    Our nights lay wrapped with the worm.

      Little mattered, and much pervaded 
        The antique living room too much sunlight had degraded; 
        A little heartache burned beneath his cassock, 
        And holy daybreak shattered at the blinds. 
5          If Christ defied his fashions 
           And strode untemplated and rude, 
           If Hitler really killed them all 
           Then how dare I intrude? 
      My voice imparts and falls, toils and tolls, 
10    Its happenstances and romances, its passions 
      Its trances of a certain evening in a certain loll 
      And on into dawn prepares some further wrong 
      Inconsequent, yet beckoning, a passionate 
      Lark backspread against dispassionate clouds. 
15    (I have stood upon the Arctic zones and poles 
      Of certain yellow unlighted rooms.) 
      Among the wasted cigarettes and torn pornography 
      I have sifted and resisted so many  
      Facts and truths that harshly glare in so many  
20    Wasted one-time afternoons. 
      Holding, holding 
      Our hands beneath the spider's pall were golden. 
      The hackneyed painter's ennui endures 
      Formulas of snow and absence, building sets; 
25    Nailed in the aurora's tonic light, and stiff, 
      My red shoes stand steadied on a cliff. 
      (I sew my fingers backward that sew my shroud.) 
      And I have wandered lost and wondered found 
      And in a crossed broken shadow drowned; 
30    (I have lived my life while floating upon the rood.) 
      Chastized eyes 
      Chastized eyes 
      Glare no more on inward wars 
      Accreted dusts that sharply crept 
35    Down the pale defiles at midnight, 
      Or assembled dust tumbled from untouched dresser drawers 
      Spilling golden dirty light over all. 
      (I have seen them all, and touched them all 
      And thrown them all away already, 
40    Golden crowns cascading to a wastebin. 
      I have touched the molten blots that blot within. 
      I have rearranged my clothes upon a hook.) 
      Here's some argument's half-misapprehension, 
      There, the moronic posture of a gesture 
45    Gilding the broken indices of fate. 
      A look, a moment's condescension 
      Gazes back from above a moth-eaten bureau 
      To fall upon the blankness of a wall. 
      And I have longed and I have lounged, 
50    Taking nights apart to tack the day together, 
      And still the terrorist dawn arrives, inflicts 
      Green and golden, and obliterates my weathers. 
      O fol de rol de rolly o 
      My bloodless feet are skirled in skeins of snow 
55    Daybreak snaps the blinds. Bored, it leaves 
      Out through exhausted windows where I have thrown 
      How many tired glances into airs unknown? 
      And they are tired, emptied by seeing, 
      Glancing netherwhere, seeing, recoiling, 
60    Seeing the thousand toiling hours of neglect 
      The glazed eyes of weary aspect, 
      Hollow yet disdainful, and rolled upon a bulb 
      Or blindly churched in the long, squared 
      Eternity of a ratty book that blazes 
65    Trashed Byzantiums in footnotes obscure; 
      Or restless finds itself still climbing 
      To some even more forgotten shelf 
      While a quaint, antiquarian transcendence 
      Cool and numb 
70    Floods moldy light upon the moldy carpeting. 
      And still the snow inquires 
      And still the day expires 
      Answerless, if my foot shall daedalus the fresh. 
      (I have killed and I have died for less.) 
75    ---No, no I haven't been. Is it near here? 
      What's it like? Is it extraordinary?  
                       Oh, its full 
      Of quiet shades, thoughtful darknesses. 
      ---My, there's no end to things in the heart. 
80    Is there now? Now is there? 
      No, no truly; 
      There is never any end to things. 
      And the squeeze of nights, the evenings 
      Where so many eden days have sank entranced, 
85    Collapsed so charmingly about an aborted heart 
      In so many unheated ochre rooms alone! 
      Oh I have seen and mourned the fabled light 
      Disastered in a rucksack crease of dirty pants. 
      And yet, how shall I begin, and how beget? 
90    I have looked through ochre eyes and hollow rooms 
      Undeceived, and yet, and yet.... 
      I am scarred and I am mastered in the garden, 
      Near the wisteria, iced by the moonlight's 
      Porcelain glances. How many years and days 
95    Has it been, how many, since first, in moonlight, 
      We traded sudden glances? 
      Roses had maddened us, and we were glad. 
      Here, balancing the wisteria on a fingerend 
      Pointing past my agile nose to oblivion, 
100   Cold leaves rustle in the ruined fountain; 
      Water's memory in the concrete bowl 
      Scratching over the water's ancient course. 
      A thousand points of light conflict 
      In a thousand parted dooryards; 
105   Conflict, flicker, and then resolve 
      Focused into a single momentary glow. 
      (My eyes and I contain 
      A thousand portions of a thousand parted souls.) 
      O fol de rol de rolly o 
110   My bloodless feet are skirled in skeins of snow

      Prodigal of laughter, stoned on your own 
      Adoring, lady, you come bearing white wrists 
      And white palms. Ensanguined chafes 
      Marr no innocence of your heart's marketplace 
5     Where a thousand eyeing roads have stumbled 
      And one has come. Chartless, mapless, and alone 
      I pursued the drunken lily of your brow. 
      Forethought at the masthead would have me dread thy death 
      But I came with the starlight, seeking exit 
10    When it dies, extinguishing with the universe. 
      Oh do not tell me of her face's radiance! 
      I have felt the radiant proof, and have confessed. 
      Her face has traced its cameo in my breast. 
      Spied waterspout beyond the breakpoint of my bones, 
15    Glorious and golden, your daffodil surmise 
      Flatters my chaste hand in the obsequious sunrise.

      The night winds, so big, grow small when you sigh, 
      So full is your breath of their sowing, 
      Even the sea's necklace of rocks cannot measure you 
      In your camisole, although they measure the sea. 
5     A vastness resides in your glances 
      As if all the earth swung in one dew-bead. 
      Your body has the lustrous strength of a horse 
      Thundering on the midnight headlands. 
      I look near you, around you, searching for edges, 
10    Sides, spaces, but you are edgeless and endless, 
      The sweet air that lets me hymn praises within her. 
      Your foundations are final beneath and above me. 
      I am flung into you like a golden rope 
      And never feel myself falling. You are the mast 
15    Oceans dissolve to arrive at. My island, female 
      As the deep scents of the jacaranda 
      Each night holds open to kiss you.

      The phosphorous stars at your fingertips flower and pinch me, 
      Awaking dark milkyways like hidden veins 
      Throughout the sulking valleys of my breast. 
      "Throw the stars up! Again!" 
5     Our serious laughter catches in the ceiling's maternal plasters, 
      Soft as the stars that have ached to arrive there. 
      I lie on the dazzled bed as on a silver pond, 
      My heart a dry pine tree reaching after the sky. 
      Fed pure starlight by your fingers 
10    Anxious and cool as grapes, I shiver against you 
      Shaking the slender constellations from your hair 
      One star at a time. I swallow the tornado of flame 
      That still hides its little blossom of light, unborn. 
      I escape out of myself, dangerous, I run away with the night, 
15    Anything, anything to trace the deep absence 
      That falls backwards into your eyes like a diver. 
      The small, mobile flagellants of your eyelids unlace me, 
      Make me plain and open as a burst fig. 
      Narrow-footed cats dance on the shards 
20    Of the steep glass-crusted cement wall to view you. 
      I hunch in their shoulderblades, and spray with their sex. 
      The moon comes out of my mouth, a swollen white tongue 
      To give you this mysterious poem.

      An iris' measure 
      Is given forever 
      Nor ever may be ungiven--- 
      So two hearts have striven 
5     To darkly top their stalk 
      With two hours' unwasted talk 
      And bluely blossom hereafter 
      Impermanent as laughter 
      Where sunlight stains  
10    Their faces champaign 
      Above tall unsteady greens 
      Tilting slenderly unseen 
      Beneath the feather-petals 
      That soft as eyelids settle 
15    Against each other's breadths 
      And kiss until their deaths.

      What feeling gives ground to stolen heaven's hours? 
      Where's the gain in ecstasy, 
      This scudless plus we connive from dusts? 
      This sinless winning that overtakes the taken 
5     And in pure mind glows lightsome, 
      In intent outshining the divine? 
      Once the heavenly terror is over 
      And nerves and veins relapse from lushness 
      To the careless tiredness of a stuffed couch, 
10    What lays in that drowse miming contemplation, 
      Or half-knots its cool eyes to unpuzzle 
      The tussling books on the bleary shelf? 
      What in God's name is the simply human? 
      What remains when we've torn down the curtain, 
15    Sunk troubles and psalms, all gone, into one ocean 
      And stand static again among sandgrains 
      Amidst the ceaseless wash?

      You have gone, you have gone 
      And left only your shadow tarrying. 
      It is in all the penumbras of my kisses. 
      The scalloped darks of your locks 
5     Drag after the feet of children running in leaves. 
      The undersides of leaves cling to your memory. 
      Light undoes itself to touch you, remember you, 
      Your wildness like a reverse fire, searing lightlessness, 
      Whole continents of shadow and dark parlance. 
10    This talk between darknesses has entered me, 
      Entered me and blossomed, so now within me I have 
      The solemn spaces between the stars, 
      Your face under the rose shadow of tresses. 
      Your shadows, formless as freedom, numberlessly large. 
15    The birds, no matter how high, cannot rise away from them 
      And I do not want to, wildly electric, escaping my fingers 
      Like sea-foam turned suddenly to wine.

      You stood up, and the world rose with you! 
      Astounding globe, charter of misty distances, held love! 
      From you, all things emitted their eternal energy. 
      From you, the sensual regale of lifted light, diamonds! 
5     From you, spears of daybreak arose, laughing lioness! 
      Night abandoned melancholy, ropes of dew lifted with you. 
      Dark-headed iris of a thousand days, 
      When love comes before us we abandon everything. 
      Old harbingers, old hates, past truths, deficiencies and victories; 
10    Miscarried words scrawled on a discarded cast. 
      The hour of getting here and getting here has arrived. 
      The clock has mounted up to your eyes with minutehand prayers. 
      Glissades and everglades tick also in your eyes. 
      Now the door of spring rushes open. 
15    Winter's broom sweeps out its ashes and its tears. 
      Now it is the hour without shadow come again, 
      And the sun collects us. Us together in our nearness! 
      Guitars boom in the garden, struck thunder, sound-blossoms. 
      In your chest, high and light, orchestras promenade 
20    Through galleries of just showing up. Like tulips. 
      Down your unleashed arms, rivers arrive at honey seas. 
      The mock turtle goes on in his heavy rounds, baying boisterously. 
      My heart has eaten up the days of us together, 
      Salty and strong in its thumb-made dish of red clay.  
25    This arriving with us and within us does not stop. 
      It goes on and on, on and on forever. 
      Stations of departure, those old crosses, stand 
      Worn and gilded. They are empty, abandoned as lice. 
      Together we come dancing and solemn, two porpoises. 
30    Our sides are streaked with blue universes of wet light. 
      Azaleas patch the landscape, color-dots motioning oboes. 
      One note the sorry, somehow sour acknowlegdement of our seperate estates. 
      In you, the first hello and the last hello. Hello! 
      In you, strange seagulls x back and forth. 
35    Those who never expected to meet themselves do so. 
      Found dogs surprise each other, exchanging rushing tails. 
      In us, the swallows' songs entangle and beat. 
      The last thrill of their virtuous vibrato domes our sky. 
      In you, dawn cannot come to autumn. Shadows are always deep. 
40    Hallucinations adopt your stance, but only you convince. 
      Let me stand upon your porch, a little old and rattled. 
      Let me travel like a shipwreck back to your anchorage. 
      Let me wash in your tender banks like a seal, and roll there. 
      Let me sink in you, hold in you, like greenness in grass. 
45    Oh my sunlight, oh my day's-breath! 
      Let me transfigure you, like chlorofil, into my own body. 
      Let me suck sweet sips of air from the cups of your ears. 
      Let me drop my heart in your mouth with this tongue. 
      These words I use rumor your abiding. 
50    And yet, you do not abide. 
      You rush through all dawns, all skies, all risings 
      With eagle feathers afloat in your hair, 
      An indian princess bartering for her bridehood. 
      A new danube charging her bankheads. 
55    You groom the night away, particle by particle, 
      Until day stuns us.