who knows if the moon’s
a baloon,coming out of a keen city
in the sky—filled with pretty people?
(and if you and i should

get into it,if they
should take me and take you into their baloon,
why then
we’d go up higher with all the pretty people

than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody’s ever visited,where

always
            it’s
                   Spring)and everyone’s
in love and flowers pick themselves

LONG ago I learned how to sleep,
In an old apple orchard where the wind swept by counting its money and throwing it away,
In a wind-gaunt orchard where the limbs forked out and listened or never listened at all,
In a passel of trees where the branches trapped the wind into whistling, "Who, who are you?"
I slept with my head in an elbow on a summer afternoon and there I took a sleep lesson.
There I went away saying: I know why they sleep, I know how they trap the tricky winds.
Long ago I learned how to listen to the singing wind and how to forget and how to hear the deep whine,
Slapping and lapsing under the day blue and the night stars:
  Who, who are you?
  
Who can ever forget
listening to the wind go by
counting its money
and throwing it away?

Who is now reading this?

May-be one is now reading this who knows some wrong-doing of my past life,
Or may-be a stranger is reading this who has secretly loved me,
Or may-be one who meets all my grand assumptions and egotisms with derision,
Or may-be one who is puzzled at me.

As if I were not puzzled at myself!
Or as if I never deride myself! (O conscience-struck! O self-convicted!)
Or as if I do not secretly love strangers! (O tenderly, a long time, and never avow it;)
Or as if I did not see, perfectly well, interior in myself, the stuff of wrong-doing,
Or as if it could cease transpiring from me until it must cease.

It clung to me like a little one,
mixed and twining with clothe threads.
The body weaved, at times vanished between folds,
Then, if contortions permitted, marked apparent by sunlight.
I plucked it free, letting it glide like a fall leaf floor bound.
Traveling away from a traveler, I pondered on its passing.
Our poignancy broke as I turned nearer to the sun.
Under arms and across the chest
More vestiges of her appeared.
I picked for them,
Their auburn bodies fading to blonde at round ends.
One by one the disembarked.
Like vapours, that past night drifted in.

Break, bend and depart
From lofty boughs of lignin towers
And ease yourself towards the earth.
The icy draft, that same draft that nips and cuts at noses and cheeks,
Makes you its plaything,
Bestowing caresses,
Shaping the descent.
Had you eyes where would they wonder?
Towards the ground, cemented in cold callous destination?
Or perhaps, in contrast, eyes ever skyward
In homage to the dreamlike boundless azure