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ViaAppia Going through me, the Roman sun Leaves the seeds ofwings in my shoulders. Two women are shining also. We are watching the Roman stone We sit on, float through the grass. Beneath it a soldier is lying. Moment by moment his lungs With flowers are filling more deeply, And his shield, with the lichen ofrust. Ifwe were to step from his grave We would fall through this earth as through water. We would lie in the full weight ofarmor, In the ponderous death of all Rome. Yet now I am thinking ofchildren, Ofthe two ways to go after death. With the blond, heavy girl, I can shed This very sun down through the years On my grandchildren's coarse, blinding hair; With the dark, other one, I could twist Black, vine-scented curls on their foreheads. I choose the bright woman, and touch her. I see that she looks more deeply Into death, to watch life arise. She could crack this stone with a smile. Yet I think ofthe dark woman's children, All spirit, and great-eyed with singing In another world, waiting to come. When I turn the blind sides ofmyself, Like armor or gold water flashing, And come back from death as another, Unremembered, descending the sun, Or drifting my dust through the smile Summons / 24 Ofthe stone love breaks like a wafer, I shall come for my chorus ofchildren Kept from life by those that I shall Have known in my present body. Dark choir behind the huge light, Thin voices with flowers for lungs, I still can make you. I am coming. Wall and Cloud The white cloud bearing to me the darkness ofmy mind Is coming in from the sea, a hundred feet out Where it is darkening the water and passing from it. Now it sails upon land, leaving the ocean brighter. Where we live, the wind is also timed, and set To come as the blood stands still. To help what shall happen to me, I walk down the hill Where a useless brown wall moves through a stand ofpines. I put my hand on its stone and feel the shade fall Up the other side and the sun cease shining there. Now I no longer have to help hold up the light; The cloud descends like the shadow ofmy brain. As all grows dark around it, I can see what is in my mind Magically freed to glow ofitselfand its meaning. For example, I see my love, whose blond hair changes to black As she comes through a gate in the wall bearing flowers Milked oftheir color and just before getting it back. The wind arrives upon us when it should. Slowly we fill up with light, and the flowers take on The painful red oftheir life, and hurt to look at As the sun shines freshly into our brains, and the wall Casts from the other side a new shadow that cannot climb After us walking upward to the house, that stilly sharpens Into more and more reality, set deep in the light ofthe world. Wall and Cloud / 25 ...

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