Collected Poems

TO A FUGITIVE

TO A FUGITIVE The night you got away, I dreamed you rose Out of the earth to lean on a young tree. Then they were there, hulking the moon away, The great dogs rooting, snuffing up the grass. You raise a hand, hungry to hold your lips Out of the wailing air; but lights begin Spidering the ground; oh they come closing in, The beam searches your face like fingertips. Hurry, Maguire, hammer the body down, Crouch to the wall again, shackle the cold Machine guns and the sheriff and the cars: Divide the bright bars of the cornered bone, Strip, run for it, break the last law, unfold, Dart down the alley, race between the stars. ELEUTHERIA Rubbing her mouth along my mouth she lost Illusions of the sky, the dreams it offered: The pale cloud walking home to winter, dust Blown to a shell of sails so far above That autumn landscape where we lay and suffered The fruits of summer in the fields of love. We lay and heard the apples fall for hours, The stripping twilight plundered trees of boughs, The land dissolved beneath the rabbit's heels, And far away I heard a window close, A haying wagon heave and catch its wheels, Some water slide and stumble and be still. The dark began to climb the empty hill. If dark Eleutheria turned and lay Forever beside me, who would care for years? The throat, the supple belly, the warm thigh from THE GREEN WALL 2J ...