At Singing Hills*

Down upon the earth, boy,
brushing dirt from broken flints.
The woman, tall, in khaki pants,
slowly stands and squints.

Down upon the earth with
pockets full of stones.

A hundred yards across the land
where knife-grass spears the sand
a bullsnake sleeps in sunlight.

Speak of arrowheads and Utah,
you,
with dignified excitement;
speak of ostrich eggs!

You and I, she'd say,
Galapagos!
Where armored turtles
heave their bulks across the land.

Here Mother Earth lies naked
to her bones.
Flint bones,
in sun as white as lamplight.

With your Thermos cup in hand
talk of arrowheads again—
or Galapagos—
Where giant turtles rule the land!

Come to the window, dear;
listen to the sea-swell
comb its patterns on the sand.

Stand by my side and hear
the clanging of a buoy-bell,
breakers crash upon the strand.

Tonight, then, you and I
may stand and breathe the evening
waiting hopefully to see

the dusk-fire turn to night,
the drunken ***** go weaving
from their holes into the sea.

You, bright-smiled sun-lover
descend on feet of flesh
past the hundred-headed best,
past the high-court Rhadamanthus.

And the hollow-gazing dead
look up from hollow homes,
and voices from the deep inquire,
"Whither now, oh flesh and bones?"

Kingfisher*

The deep, golden moments of winter
fly like geese above a field.
The kingfisher nests below
where the lake stirs like a breathing beast.

Fish jumps, once, twice, in the crystal air,
slaps silver side on the trembling pool.

These are the days of stillness,
of the morning sun's radiant
benediction on the settled hills.

Beyond the bristling slopes
gray with naked branch and twig;
beyond the mountain cloaked in fog
it sleeps, that nameless peace,
beyond embrace or longing.

Halcyon—
blue-green, sun-glancing
(fire to fire, man to god!),
from lake to pathless sky—
See! There! The breathless
bell-beat of its wings.

In this silent march of days,
at the moment least propitious,
with sunlight's faintest glow
upon that gleaming back—
it shall rise, arch, and fall.

And man shall see and say
with a nod, "It is all."

Shivering in the tempest of his eye,
go to him, martyred spirit, go
where sleep is like oblivion, pure,
and pain falls from the broken soul.

Washed by the gaze of a dreadful god,
pursued through the years, Io, chaste, unheard,
in the dust of a somnolent world, you
have gone where darkness bathes the naked.

You have traced the silent correspondence,
have seen, smelled, tasted infinity
where life is a distant flower, where
to sleep is to wake in an empty bower.

The touch of a mother's hand upon
your quivering arm, c'est goût Néant;
the life of oblivion for the ravished soul,
the *****, the wine of dreamless sleep.

What the infinitude sought so long?
Where behind confused words
lives unity, crepuscular, deep,
where entropy is order, order is complete?

Now, translated beneath this ground
you may sleep  un sommeil profonde,
undisturbed by setting suns,
still unheard by clamoring men.

Sleep, pious poet, sleep, beneath
the unworried sway of timeless worlds,
where sound, smell, touch, and sight
blend as in a sensed but senseless night.

High upon a basalt cliff,
carpeted round with lily fields
and blanching poppys' lips,
high upon a basalt throne,
Persephone sits.

Frail as lily wands,
lithe as Syrinx songs upon a reed.

And there, below,
grim Sisyphus,
and there the Centaur-sire
spins upon a wheel of fire.

And there, Tantalus sits grinning
mumbling prayers of sin and sinning,
hunkered down to steal the peach
which quickly leaps beyond his reach.

Or there, a hundred weary sisters
with a hundred leaking jugs
and a cistern dry as bone.

High upon the basalt cliff,
still as infant breath upon the air,
Persphone, sits and stares.

I had not hoped, or thought,
to find that destination,
that broken patch of gravel
where the trees give way.

For as long as I had walked
with head bent low to the hill
and feet scrambling hard and fast
against the crumbling ground

I gave no thought to destinations
or places where the pathway ends.

And now, the long-followed trail
has ended, ceased where the forest
parts like a milling crowd
at the passing of a king's grim retinue.

And though the mountains up and up,
ascend with Titan shoulders naked
to the forceful blue, the path
has ceased to follow.

But as I climbed
I gave no thought to destinations
or places where the pathway ends.