How many authors,
Unearthly meticulous,
Have left us symbols in scarves; or, say,
Surreptitiously submerged in salad dressing,
The idea of the priest confessing;
Clues folded carefully between innocuous lines,
So carefully that in ten thousand pairs of eyes,
Not one perceives the crease?

And what kind of beautiful sadist plants flowers in shadow?

I cannot bear the empty tears that they must shed,
The monstrous mute meaninglessness of these
Lessons taught, and not learned!
Worse: words, while wise,
Are not our only teachers.

So I look for the mirrors in smoke,
And in skies, in eyes,
In every word the wind spoke.
Until everything is a mirror;
Everything, however dull, reflects.

When I tried to ride a bicycle today--
And not just because I want that idiom to be true,
But simply because I want to learn how--
When I put my heart to the pedal,
And the wind bent down to whisper,
Unintelligible, but clearly intelligent,
Into my ear,
It felt like I had failed them;
I could not listen, but only hear.

On this generally generous June morning,
The very last of the Daylilies bloomed.
I saw it later, in an evening hour,
And I imagined, as I rode past,
That it (or its reflection) asked
“Might I be, after all, only a flower?”

“To navigate by mirror alone
Is to walk always in reverse.”
So the lily seemed to say
As it awaited, alone, its floral hearse.

I will not, without reason,
Deny a dying wish.

We were both there then,
Filtering words through humid air
That warned us not to hope,
This time, for an accident--
We both saw it burning,
Both felt the ashes brush our skin, as if in
Consolation or apology, as they fell,
As we fell to our knees.

Along the city’s second longest street
At the end of its second longest month
Walked a woman, in plaid,
Lugging an incongruous antique lamp
Toward the sun.

In the desert, the dunes,
The piles of grains of sand,
Are constantly rearranged,
Redistributed, reconciled by the winds--
Are, in short, in flux--
Are never what they once were,
And never will be again.

When the wind’s favor, for a while,
Aggrandizes a particular pile,
Does it look down upon its fellows?
Does it call itself a king, and proclaim,
“Bow before me, for I am the mightiest,
The grainiest, the sandiest
Of all possible piles of grains of sand;
For I have, I am more of nothing
Than you will ever understand”?

Do you ever feel like giving up?
I have heard you say so, but your eyes--
Your eyes say something else.

I wish it were as simple
As asking how, after
Your ink and your soul
Should have been drunk dry
By pitiless papers piled high--
How, when mine have fallen to the floor
Your eyes are still so bright.

You laugh, finding limits
And leave them behind.

Was I ever so tenacious?
I thought so, only--
I thought too slowly.

All my own dim, damp lenses can see,
In that stark white lined expanse,
Is a darkness, darker than ink,
And deeper than night.
But your eyes are so bright.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—”
I took one look at the impenetrable obscurities
That the distance concealed,
And another at the unanswering stones,
That consented mutely to mark the way, if not lead;
At the bending flowers whose faces I could not read;
And heard the equivocal vocalizations
Of ambiguously colored birds, and I—
I walked from the path to sit beneath a nearby tree,
And began to wait.