Some Trees: Poems Read Free Page B

the instant
    Of their interest, in the shadow
    Of a million boats; their hunger
    From loss grown merely a gesture?

Sonnet
    Each servant stamps the reader with a look.
    After many years he has been brought nothing.
    The servant’s frown is the reader’s patience.
    The servant goes to bed.
    The patience rambles on
    Musing on the library’s lofty holes.
    His pain is the servant’s alive.
    It pushes to the top stain of the wall
    Its tree-top’s head of excitement:
    Baskets, birds, beetles, spools.
    The light walls collapse next day.
    Traffic is the reader’s pictured face.
    Dear, be the tree your sleep awaits;
    Worms be your words, you not safe from ours.

Chaos
    Don’t ask me to go there again
    The white is too painful
    Better to forget it
    the sleeping river spoke to the awake land
    When they first drew the wires
    across the field
    slowly air settled
    on the pools
    The blue mirror came to light
    Then someone feared the pools
    To be armor enough might not someone
    draw down the sky
    Light emerged
    The swimming motion
    At last twilight that will not protect the leaves
    Death that will not try to scream
    Black beaches
    That is why I sent you the black postcard that will never deafen
    That is why land urges the well
    The white is running in its grooves
    The river slides under our dreams
    but land flows more silently

The Orioles
    What time the orioles came flying
    Back to the homes, over the silvery dikes and seas,
    The sad spring melted at a leap,
    The shining clouds came over the hills to meet them.
    The old house guards its memories; the birds
    Stream over colored snow in summer
    Or back into the magic rising sun in winter.
    They cluster at the feeding station, and rags of song
    Greet the neighbors. “Was that your voice?”
    And in spring the mad caroling continues long after daylight
    As each builds his hanging nest
    Of pliant twigs and the softest moss and grasses.
    But one morning you get up and the vermilion-colored
    Messenger is there, bigger than life at the window.
    “I take my leave of you; now I fly away
    To the sunny reeds and marshes of my winter home.”
    And that night you gaze moodily
    At the moonlit apple-blossoms, for of course
    Horror and repulsion do exist! They do! And you wonder,
    How long will the perfumed dung, the sunlit clouds cover my heart?
    And then some morning when the snow is flying
    Or it lines the black fir-trees, the light cries,
    The excited songs start up in the yard!
    The feeding station is glad to receive its guests,
    But how long can the stopover last?
    The cold begins when the last song retires,
    And even when they wing against the trees in bright formation
    You know the peace they brought was long overdue.

The Young Son
    The screen of supreme good fortune curved his absolute smile into a celestial scream. These things (the most arbitrary that could exist) wakened denials, thoughts of putrid reversals as he traced the green paths to and fro. Here and there a bird sang, a rose silenced her expression of him, and all the gaga flowers wondered. But they puzzled the wanderer with their vague wearinesses. Is the conclusion, he asked, the road forced by concubines from exact meters of strategy? Surely the trees are hinged to no definite purpose or surface. Yet now a wonder would shoot up, all one color, and virtues would jostle each other to get a view of nothing—the crowded house, two faces glued fast to the mirror, corners and the bustling forest ever preparing, ever menacing its own shape with a shadow of the evil defenses gotten up and in fact already exhausted in some void of darkness, some kingdom he knew the earth could not even bother to avoid if the minutes arranged and divine lettermen with smiling cries were to come in the evening of administration and night which no cure, no bird ever more compulsory, no subject apparently intent on its heart’s own demon would forestall even if the truths she told of were now being seriously lit, one by one, in the hushed and fast