Collected Poems

THE COLD DIVINITIES

Maybe the dead musician underneath Whispers to touch the woman's nakedness, To strike a fire inside the yearning rock. Brush aside that fantasy, I feel The wind of early autumn cross the ground, I turn among the stones to let it blow Clearly across my face as over stone. Bodiless yearnings make no music fall; Breath of the body bears the living sound. This dour musician died so long ago Even his granite beard is softened down. An age or so will wear away his grave, The lover who attains the girl be rain, The granite underneath be carved no more. Only the living body calls up love, That shadow risen casually from stone To clothe the nakedness of bare desire. A PRAYER IN MY SICKNESS la muerte entra y sale You hear the long roll of the plunging ground, The whistle of stones, the quail's cry in the grass. I stammer like a bird, I rasp like stone, I mutter, with gray hands upon my face. The earth blurs, beyond me, into dark. Spinning in such bewildered sleep, I need To know you, whirring above me, when I wake. Come down. Come down. I lie afraid. I have lain alien in my self so long, How can I understand love's angry tongue? THE COLD DIVINITIES I should have been delighted there to hear The woman and the boy, SAINT JUDAS 65 Singing along the shore together. Lightly the shawl and shoulder of the sea Upbore the plume and body of one gull Dropping his lines. Loping behind a stone too large for waves To welter down like pumice without sound, Laughing his languages awake, that boy Flung to his mother, on a wrack of weeds, Delicate words, a whisper like a spume Fluting along the edges of the shore. I should have been delighted that the cries Of fishermen and gulls Faded among the swells, to let me Gather into the fine seines of my ears The frail fins of their voices as they sang: My wife and child. Lovely the mother shook her hair, so long And glittering in its darkness, as the moon In the deep lily-heart of the hollowing swells Flamed toward the cold caves of the evening sea: And the fine living frieze of her Greek face; The sea behind her, fading, and the sails. I should have been delighted for the gaze, The billowing of the girl, The bodying skirt, the ribbons falling; I should have run to gather in my arms The mother and the child who seemed to live Stronger than stone and wave. But slowly twilight gathered up the skiffs Into its long gray arms; and though the sea Grew kind as possible to wrack-splayed birds; And though the sea like woman vaguely wept; She could not hide her clear enduring face, Her cold divinities of death and change. 66 ...