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Love the white air, the shadow where it lay. Dear love, I called your name in air today, I saw the picnic vanish down the hill, And waved the moon awake, with empty hands. COME FORTH Lazarus lay to see the body turn. The femur first removed itself from arms, The elbows folded under each other soon. The clavicle and vertebrae and shin Divided like the stars and let the air Caress the flesh awake before it fell. Only the torpid brain would not remove. From far away beyond the granite walls A vowel of longing tore the wind in two. Come forth, it said. But who is this who cried? For I have left the human long ago, My flesh a synagogue the flame has eaten. Before the voice the worms began to pray, And fled away howling into the granite. The shin returned to spring a leaping leg, The skull rounded itself upon the brain, The heart arose and cried with joy for pain, The arteries assumed a thud again. And the hair furied on the shocking head, And muscles blossomed like the thunderhead That trumpets the pale tropics to green storm. The stones rolling away and the air thrust Into the lung of the cave, Lazarus knew The unholy and indifferent sting of wind 42 Across the flesh of man. Outside, the sun Flayed the same bone as before. Nevertheless His treading skeleton clattered like a choir And waved him forward on a crest of praise. A wall or two away the calling voice Shook like a pacing father, and was still. O blessed fire, O harsh and loving air. ERINNA TO SAPPHO I saw your shoulder swell and pitch Alive, your fingers, curving, turn To summon me above that ditch Where I lay down. Yet as I came, you turned about And waved to someone out of sight, Someone you could not do without That very night. Who was she? for I only saw Mellifluous berries fall from vines, Long apple blooms depress a bough, Clustering wines Dripping their liquor as they hung In spray and tendril, curling hair. You flickered your inviting tongue At no one there; No one but air, garden, the hewn Poet above his pedestal, Lyre in the marble, song in stone, The trees, the wall; Unless there was, before I rose, One of the hollow things who walk from THE GREEN WALL 43 ...

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