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.