I Imagine the Gods

I imagine the gods saying, We will

make it up to you. We will give you

three wishes, they say. Let me see

the squirrels again, I tell them.

Let me eat some of the great hog

stuffed and roasted on its giant spit

and put out, steaming, into the winter

of my neighborhood when I was usually

too broke to afford even the hundred grams

I ate so happily walking up the cobbles,

past the Street of the Moon

and the Street of the Birdcage-Makers,

the Street of Silence and the Street

of the Little Pissing. We can give you

wisdom, they say in their rich voices.

Let me go at last to Hugette, I say,

the Algerian student with her huge eyes

who timidly invited me to her room

when I was too young and bewildered

that first year in Paris.

Let me at least fail at my life.

Think, they say patiently, we could

make you famous again. Let me fall

in love one last time, I beg them.

Teach me mortality, frighten me

into the present. Help me to find

the heft of these days. That the nights

will be full enough and my heart feral.

About Friends

The good thing about friends


is not having to finish sentences.


I sat a whole summer afternoon with my friend once

on a river bank, bashing heels on the baked mud

and watching the small chunks slide into the water

and listening to them - plop plop plop.

He said, 'I like the twigs when they...you know...

like that.' I said, 'There's that branch...'

We both said, 'Mmmm'. The river flowed and flowed

and there were lots of butterflies, that afternoon.


I first thought there was a sad thing about friends

when we met twenty years later.

We both talked hundreds of sentences,

taking care to finish all we said,

and explain it all very carefully,

as if we'd been discovered in places

we should not be, and were somehow ashamed.


I understood then what the river meant by flowing.

White Apples

when my father had been dead a week

I woke

with his voice in my ear

I sat up in bed



and held my breath

and stared at the pale closed door



white apples and the taste of stone



if he called again

I would put on my coat and galoshes

Love Sonnet VIII

If your eyes were not the color of the moon,
of a day full of clay, and work, and fire,
if even held-in you did not move in agile grace like the air,
if you were not an amber week,

not the yellow moment
when autumn climbs up through the vines;
if you were not that bread the fragrant moon
kneads, sprinkling its flour across the sky,

oh, my dearest, I would not love you so!
But when I hold you I hold everything that is--
sand, time, the tree of the rain,

everything is alive so that I can be alive:
without moving I can see it all:
in your life I see everything that lives.

Old Lilacs

Through early April cold,


these thin gray horses

have come near the house

as to a fence, and lean there

hungry for summer,

nodding their heads

with a nickering of twigs.



Their long legs are dusty

from standing for months

in winter’s stall, and their eyes

are like a cloudy sky

seen through bare branches.



They are waiting for May

to come up from the barn

with her overalls pockets

stuffed from the fodder

of green. In a month

they will be slow and heavy,

their little snorts so sweet

you’ll want to stand

among them, breathing.

Ana Carolina e Seu Jorge: e isso ai

Language

When a man is in love



how can he use old words?



Should a woman



desiring her lover



lie down with



grammarians and linguists?



***



I said nothing



to the woman I loved



but gathered



love's adjectives into a suitcase



and fled from all languages.

Lead

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

Love, we're going home now

Love, we're going home now,
Where the vines clamber over the trellis:
Even before you, the summer will arrive,
On its honeysuckle feet, in your bedroom.

Our nomadic kisses wandered over all the world:
Armenia, dollop of disinterred honey:
Ceylon, green dove: and the YangTse with its old
Old patience, dividing the day from the night.

And now, dearest, we return, across the crackling sea
Like two blind birds to their wall,
To their nest in a distant spring:

Because love cannot always fly without resting,
Our lives return to the wall, to the rocks of the sea:
Our kisses head back home where they belong.

Wishes

moody rain
the rainbow's breath settles
on a windowpane
----------------------------------------

in South India

summer market
the hot tar
smells like jasmine

It's too hot to eat

quiet dinner-
the crisp snap
of baby carrots

The blue boat

How late the daylight edges

toward the northern night

as though journeying

in a blue boat, gilded in mussel shell

with, slung from its mast, a lantern

like our old idea of the soul

All that is glorious around us

is not, for me, these grand vistas, sublime peaks, mist-filled
overlooks, towering clouds, but doing errands on a day
of driving rain, staying dry inside the silver skin of the car,
160,000 miles, still running just fine. Or later,
sitting in a café warmed by the steam
from white chicken chilli, two cups of dark coffee,
watching the red and gold leaves race down the street,
confetti from autumn’s bright parade. And I think
of how my mother struggles to breathe, how few good days
she has now, how we never think about the glories
of breath, oxygen cascading down our throats to the lungs,
simple as the journey of water over a rock. It is the nature
of stone / to be satisfied / writes Mary Oliver, It is the nature
of water / to want to be somewhere else, rushing down
a rocky tor or high escarpment, the panoramic landscape
boundless behind it. But everything glorious is around
us already: black and blue graffiti shining in the rain’s
bright glaze, the small rainbows of oil on the pavement,
where the last car to park has left its mark on the glistening
street, this radiant world.

White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field

Coming down out of the freezing sky

with its depths of light,

like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,

it was beautiful, and accurate,

striking the snow and whatever was there

with a force that left the imprint

of the tips of its wings — five feet apart —

and the grabbing thrust of its feet,

and the indentation of what had been running

through the white valleys of the snow —

and then it rose, gracefully,

and flew back to the frozen marshes

to lurk there, like a little lighthouse,

in the blue shadows —

so I thought:

maybe death isn't darkness, after all,

but so much light wrapping itself around us

as soft as feathers —

that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,

and shut our eyes, not without amazement,

and let ourselves be carried,

as through the translucence of mica,

to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,

that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light —

in which we are washed and washed

out of our bones.

Love Pirates

I follow with my mouth the small wing of muscle

under your shoulder, lean over your back, breathing

into your hair and thinking of nothing. I want

to lie down with you under the sails of a wooden sloop

and drift away from all of it, our two cars rusting

in the parking lot, our families whining like tame geese

at feeding time, and all the bosses of the earth

cursing the traffic in the morning haze.

They will telephone each other from their sofas

and glass desks, with no idea where we could be,

unable to picture the dark throat

of the saxophone playing upriver, or the fire

we gather between us on this fantail of dusty light,

having stolen a truckload of roses

and thrown them into the sea.