Olympics are Covered with Snow
The Olympics are covered with snow
Through a cloud break the sun is
showing me this across the Sound
First day of Spring
Shake off the feelings of impending disaster
What is happier than those beautiful mountains?
Who is more privileged than you
to take them in
and the rhythm of the blue water
and rhythm of the train
and the rhythm of the sky born bird wing
and the rhythm of the swimming birds
in lines and clusters?
here and there the water
smoothed like a bed sheet
One Night
One night, the middle of the night, I found
that you were in my arms — sweet tenderness!
And with each unrepeatable caress
our joy transformed to something more profound.
For happy we have been for many days,
caresses we have shared many a night,
but we were climbing then to such a height
we could reach up to touch love’s brightest blaze.
Yet when you slipped out of my dreaming arms
and I fell out of love’s own sunlit sky
into my unshared, midnight bed, no cry
of sorrow I made, I felt no alarms,
Certain when you returned another night
we’d soar together to that dreamed-of height.
Ophelia
Où sont les fleurs d’Ophélie?
Cast upon the water
By the very soul of beauty
A dead man’s daughter.
The light that lights the eyes of all who see her
Is darkness at its heart;
Her bouquets, scented manacles that bind her
To a fated part
To linger, beautiful, where petal, song and tear
Are cast upon the water.
Où sont les chansons d’Ophélie?
In the wind’s cold, forward face:
Tunes mysterious and pretty,
Chained to confusion, cast down in disgrace.
The tender modulations of their key,
Major to minor,
Her brave notes bending to her misery
Harmonize disaster,
And so release her desperate message, free
In the wind’s cold, forward face.
Où sont les pleurs d’Ophélie?
Avec ses fleurs, avec ses chansons douces,
Mingled where the grey stream gathers icily
Awaiting souls who see no further use.
The fabric of her dress and of her flowers,
Cell by cell yield to the pond
The songs and tears of unbelieving hours,
A heart too fond.
So Beauty settles where the sunlight shivers,
Avec ses fleurs, avec ses chansons douces.
Opus Vitae Meae
This work is my life’s second breath,
as necessary as the first.
It is my daily birth and death.
It feeds my heart so it must burst.
It is my jailor and my friend,
my priest, and she that ravishes.
She leaves me weeping in the end,
lamenting half-filled promises.
She leaves me weeping in my cell.
She presses money in my hand.
She nimbly turns the lock as well,
to set me freer than that wind.
This work is a great edifice
of infinite variety.
Though it is high, it’s wrapped in mist,
A Tower of Obscurity.
But if the famous sun should shine
to burn away this obscure cloud,
it would reveal a silly shrine,
a Circus Castle, odd and proud.
See, built into its ev’ry stair,
each colonnade and every brick —
the substance of my breathing there,
the grandeur of this holy trick.