The forked trunk and branches are
also a kind of necessary
prose—shingled with leaves,
pigment and song
imposed on the blunt
lineaments of fact, a foliage
of small birds among them.
The tree lifts itself up
in the garden, the
clutter of its green
leaves halving the light,
stating the unalterable
congruity and form
of its casual growth;
the crimson finches appear
and disappear, singing
among the design.
THE WILD
In the empty lot—a place
not natural, but wild—among
the trash of human absence,
the slough and shamble
of the city’s seasons, a few
old locusts bloom.
A few woods birds
fly and sing
in the new foliage
—warblers and tanagers, birds
wild as leaves; in a million
each one would be rare,
new to the eyes. A man
couldn’t make a habit
of such color,
such flight and singing.
But they are the habit of this
wasted place. In them
the ground is wise. They are
its remembrance of what it is.
THE PLAN
My old friend, the owner
of a new boat, stops by
to ask me to fish with him,
and I say I will—both of us
knowing that we may never
get around to it, it may be
years before we’re both
idle again on the same day.
But we make a plan, anyhow,
in honor of friendship
and the fine spring weather
and the new boat
and our sudden thought
of the water shining
under the morning fog.
THE BROKEN GROUND
The opening out and out,
body yielding body:
the breaking
through which the new
comes, perching
above its shadow
on the piling up
darkened broken old
husks of itself:
bud opening to flower
opening to fruit opening
to the sweet marrow
of the seed—taken
from what was, from
what could have been.
What is left
is what is.
from Findings
THE DESIGN OF A HOUSE
1.
Except in idea, perfection is as wild
as light; there is no hand laid on it.
But the house is a shambles unless
the vision of its perfection
upholds it like stone.
More probable: the ideal
of its destruction:
cloud of fire prefiguring
its disappearance.
What value there is
is assumed;
like a god, the house elects its omens;
because it is, I desire it should be
—white, its life intact in it,
among trees.
Love has conceived a house,
and out of its labor
brought forth its likeness
—the emblem of desire, continuing
though the flesh falls away.
2.
We’ve come round again
to short days and long nights;
time goes;
the clocks barely keep up;
a spare dream of summer
is kept
alive in the house:
