hold on to me
we only have a little while,
left in these aching human shapes
it won't be long,
my sweet sweet love
it won't be long

in the birdsong hush of dusk
slipping out from the waking world, I find you there
my dear one
my being rises
and I am so close to you and I am reaching out my hands
filled with heart,
the whole of me a blooming swell
stretching out to touch you
with all of our years,
like a tree waiting
always
longing toward the sun.

but somehow, in that scattering light,
you are too far.
and when I cry out to you
my sound dies into the night
you do not hear.
then, the dark comes,
and the dream of your nearness
rolls over into the black

in the morning,
the distance seems colder
as much as I quiver I cannot shake it.
exposed, naked, arms spread for embrace
I am so much unopened love
only, only
for you
I am a home, sad and empty.

deep at its core,
the earth aches and burns

what makes you ring with such a hollow sound
when perplexed, I turn my knuckles round
to tap some stir from you?

Cold now.
Close to the edge. Almost
unbearable. Clouds
bunch up and boil down
from the north of the white bear.
This tree-splitting morning
I dream of his fat tracks,
the lifesaving suet.

I think of summer with its luminous fruit,
blossoms rounding to berries, leaves,
handfuls of grain.

Maybe what cold is, is the time
we measure the love we have always had, secretly,
for our own bones, the hard knife-edged love
for the warm river of the I, beyond all else; maybe

that is what it means the beauty
of the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals.

In the season of snow,
in the immeasurable cold,
we grow cruel but honest; we keep
ourselves alive,
if we can, taking one after another
the necessary bodies of others, the many
crushed red flowers.

Nature doesn't end at cement.
It is
a pour
            i
              n
                  g
          ­            over into

                                                  space

  ­           of the Manifest,
in all its twisting,
reaching ways.
It finds a hallow and calls it home.

Nature is               lonely
but never alone.
Mesh of living weave,
water altered
in the shape of its dwelling,
looking out over      horizons
wrapped around
its e x p a n s e .

Alive and s w e l l i n g ,
in dance and song,
beckoning.

Snake makes a feast of his tail.

One Mother is hungry.

1712

A Pit—but Heaven over it—
And Heaven beside, and Heaven abroad,
And yet a Pit—
With Heaven over it.

To stir would be to slip—
To look would be to drop—
To dream—to sap the Prop
That holds my chances up.
Ah! Pit! With Heaven over it!

The depth is all my thought—
I dare not ask my feet—
’Twould start us where we sit
So straight you’d scarce suspect
It was a Pit—with fathoms under it—
Its Circuit just the same.
Seed—summer—tomb—
Whose Doom to whom?