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Frost crawls down offit And backs into only The bottom two corners ofglass. VI He stirs, with the sun held at him Out oflate-winter dawn, and blazing Levelly into his face. He blazes back with his eyes closed, Given, also, renewed Fertility, to raise Dead plants and half-dead beasts Out oftheir thawing holes, And children up, From mortal women or angels, As true to themselves as he Is only in visited darkness For one night out ofthe year, And as he is now, seeing straight Through the roof wide wider Wide awake. Breath Breath is on my face when the cloudy sun Is on my neck. By it, the dangers ofwater are carefully Kept; kept back: This is done with yourfather again In memory) it says. Let me kneel on the boards ofthe rowboat, Father, where it sways Among the fins and shovel heads Ofsurfaced sharks Helmets / I68 And remember how I saw come shaping up Through lightening darks Ofthe bay another thing that rose From the depths on air And opened the green ofits skull to breathe What we breathed there. A porpoise circled around where I Lay in your hands And felt my fear apportioned to the sharks, Which fell to sands Two hundred feet down within cold. Looking over the side, I saw that beak rise up beneath my face And a hole in the head Open greenly, and then show living pink, And breath come out In a mild, unhurried, unfathomable sigh That raised the boat And left us all but singing in midair. Have you not seen, Father, in Heaven, the eye ofearthly things Open and breathe green, Bestowing comfort on the mortal soul In deadly doubt, Sustaining the spirit moving on the waters In hopeless light? We arched and plunged with that beast to land. Amazing, that unsealed lung Come up from the dark; that breath, controlled, Greater than song, That huge body raised from the sea Secretly smiling And shaped by the air it had carried Through the stark sailing And changeless ignorance ofbrutes, So that a dream Breath / I69 Began in my closed head, ofthe curves and rolling Powers ofseraphim, That lift the good man's coffin on their breath And bear it up, A rowboat, from the sons' depleting grief That will not stop: Those that hide within time till the time Is wholly right, Then come to us slowly, out ofnowhere and anywhere risen, Breathlessly bright. The Ice Skin All things that go deep enough Into rain and cold Take on, before they break down, A shining in every part. The necks ofslender trees Reel under it, too much crowned, Like princes dressing as kings, And the redwoods let sink their branches Like arms that try to hold buckets Filling slowly with diamonds Until a cannon goes off Somewhere inside the still trunk And a limb breaks, just before midnight, Plunging houses into the darkness And hands into cupboards, all seeking Candles, and finding each other. There is this skin Always waiting in cold-enough air. I have seen aircraft, in war, Squatting on runways, Dazed with their own enclosed, Coming-forth, intensified color As though seen by a child in a poem. Helmets / 170 ...

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