I am singing to you
Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;
Hard as a man in handcuffs,
Held where he cannot move:
...
Chatter of birds two by two raises a night song joining a litany of running water--sheer waters
showing the russet of old stones remembering many rains.
And the long willows drowse on the shoulders of the running water, and sleep from much music;
...
And this will be all?
And the gates will never open again?
And the dust and the wind will play around the rusty door
...
Hot gold runs a winding stream on the inside of a green bowl.
Yellow trickles in a fan figure, scatters a line of skirmishes, spreads a chorus
of dancing girls, performs blazing ochre evolutions, gathers the whole show into
...
Here is dust remembers it was a rose
one time and lay in a woman's hair.
Here is dust remembers it was a woman
one time and in her hair lay a rose.
...
I will read ashes for you, if you ask me.
I will look on the fire and tell you from the gray lashes
And out of the red and black tongues and stripes,
I will tell how fire comes
...
Every year Emily Dickinson sent one friend
the first arbutus bud in her garden.
...
I shall foot it
Down the roadway in the dusk,
Where shapes of hunger wander
And the fugitives of pain go by.
...