Babette Deutsch

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Fawns in the winter wood
Who feel their horns, and leap,
Swans whom the bleakening mood
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These are the streets where we walked with war and childhood
Like our two shadows behind us, or
Before us like one shadow.
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Content that now the bleeding bone be swept
Out of her reach, she lay upon her side.
In a blonde void sunk deep, she slept, she slept
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If you press a stone with your finger,
Sir Isaac Newton observed,
The finger is also
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What do we need for love—a midnight fire
Flinging itself by fistfuls up the chimney
In soft bright snatches? Do we need the snow,
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And there was stormy silence in that city,
A silence of the unborn where it moved
In darkness, piteous, but without pity,
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Heat urges secret odors from the grass.
Blunting the edge of silence, crickets shrill.
Wings veer: inane needles of light, and pass.
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Sunrise tumbling in like a surf,
A foam of petals, curling thousands, lightly crumbling
Away into light.
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Little finger of fiery green, it
flickers over stone. Waits
in a weed's shadow.
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Into this net of leaves, green as old glass
That the sun fondles, trembling like images
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Sky is such softness, is such dark,
Mt as the pelt of a black panther is
In his den's bight. Under the mat soft black
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Hell is not far below,
Not black, nor burning,
Nor even past returning:
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Beyond the window the moon may be in riot
With the winter night. But your voice having ceased
In the room here, silence comes, barefooted,
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Her drooping wrist, her arm
Move as a swan should move,
First singing when death dawns
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Assembling ways to glisten,
Immensity
Is fresh as paint, and friendly,
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Staring in zoos at the dull-eyed and wild
Who never meet their gaze,
The child, the refugee, the idle sailor
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Once it was packed like a box with the toys of childhood,
Even the largest dolls grown small and familiar,
And the cuckoo clock saying,
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