Your mind is a heart-trembling sight,
And often as you flaunt it I know
I should never tell you it destrings me,
(Sets me wrong and then puts me in tune.)
I mustn't ever never
Say I wish to do the same to you.

(I would caress the insides of your bones,
Kiss your esophagus, clean your arteries;
I would eagerly sew myself inside you.)
I mustn't ever never
Anglerfish my way into saying
"I would be a limb on your body."
And yet "I love you" cannot possibly -

I would live in your synapses quietly
Never intruding, you wouldn't notice me,
Perhaps even forget me by and by;
But I would electric-think my way through
Your toomuchmind sofastly:

I would repair the gaps with
Scraps of myself torn off, I would
Maintain you invisibly with
My unvisible tools unsensed
And silentdense as an atom's center
Whose disvisible weight is universelifting.

I would lift worlds onto you
As though nothing ever sang sadness
And every(right)thing strongly whispering
Through your veins would know
"I want to pulse your blood and beat your heart."

So much more "love" cannot possibly
Desire, I desire (to make you) the
Overloved lover my domain over:
The king and the grass and the sky.

Accidentally locked out
Of my cavern,
With cold for company.
Cold, and thoughts
Uncold:
Kept hot in the thermos in my chest,
Kept sweet:
Borrowed juice of a ripe fruit -
A peach, do let's say a peach -
Uncold company,
And in loneliness
A warmth...

A neatlyfolded
Origami Man is going 'round
Cleverbuzzing and kindsmiling
At little sillyshining things
That sometimes climb Him,
With My name folded up inside
And warm in the thermos
In His paper chest -

The stem of a mouse wineglass
Is not so delicate
Nor is He any less
Solid than the granite
'Pon which I'm resting -
That something fragile should be
So arresting...

The thought pins me warmly
In place,
So what of a wait?
Inside or out, hot or cold,
Somehow somewhere He is
Impossibly folded up
Around Me.

I can wait.

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.