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After some years Bohemian came to this— This Maenad with hair down and gaping kiss Wild on the barren edge of under fifty. She would finance his art if he were thrifty.

This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.

If wisdom, as it seems it is, Be the recovery of some bliss From the conditions of disaster— Terror the servant, man the master— It does not follow we should seek Crises to prove ourselves unweak. Much of our lives, God knows, is error, But who will trifle with unrest? These fools who would solicit terror, Obsessed with being unobsessed; Professionals of experience Who have disasters to withstand them As if fear never had unmanned them, Flaunt a presumptuous innocence. I have preferred indifference.

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme— why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter’s vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light.

For my daughter

At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time, When you set your fancies free, Will they pass to where—by death, fools think, imprisoned— Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so, —Pity me? Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken! What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel —Being—who? One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake. No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time Greet the unseen with a cheer! Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, "Strive and thrive!" cry "Speed,—fight on, fare ever There as here!"

Sir Charles into my chamber coming in, When I was writing of my ‘Fairy Queen;’ ‘I pray’—said he—‘when Queen Mab you do see Present my service to her Majesty: And tell her I have heard Fame's loud report Both of her beauty and her stately court.’ When I Queen Mab within my fancy viewed, My thoughts bowed low, fearing I should be rude; Kissing her garment thin which fancy made, I knelt upon a thought, like one that prayed; And then, in whispers soft, I did present His humble service which in mirth was sent; Thus by imagination I have been In Fairy court and seen the Fairy Queen.

A momentary rupture to the vision: the wavering limbs of a birch fashion the fluttering hem of the deity’s garment, the cooling cup of coffee the ocean the deity waltzes across. This is enough—but sometimes the deity’s heady ta-da coaxes the cherries in our mental slot machine to line up, and our brains summon flickering silver like salmon spawning a river; the jury decides in our favor, and we’re free to see, for now. A flaw swells from the facets of a day, increasing the day’s value; a freakish postage stamp mails our envelope outside time; hairy, claw-like magnolia buds bloom from bare branches; and the deity pops up again like a girl from a giant cake. O deity: you transfixing transgressor, translating back and forth on the border without a passport. Fleeing revolutions of same-old simultaneous boredom and boredom, we hoard epiphanies under the bed, stuff them in jars and bury them in the backyard; we cram our closet with sunrise; prop up our feet and drink gallons of wow!; we visit the doctor because all this is raising the blood’s levels of c

The flowering sea and the mountains in the moon’s waning the great stone close to the Barbary figs and the asphodels the jar that refused to go dry at the end of day and the closed bed by the cypress trees and your hair golden; the stars of the Swan and that other star, Aldebaran. I’ve kept a rein on my life, kept a rein on my life, travelling among yellow trees in driving rain on silent slopes loaded with beech leaves, no fire on their peaks; it’s getting dark. I’ve kept a rein on my life; on your left hand a line a scar at your knee, perhaps they exist on the sand of the past summer perhaps they remain there where the north wind blew as I hear an alien voice around the frozen lake. The faces I see do not ask questions nor does the woman bent as she walks giving her child the breast. I climb the mountains; dark ravines; the snow-covered plain, into the distance stretches the snow-covered plain, they ask nothing neither time shut up in dumb chapels nor hands outstretched to beg, nor the roads. I’ve kept a rein on my life whispering in a boundless silence I no longer know how to speak nor how to think; whispers like the breathing of the cypress tree that night like the human voice of the night sea on pebbles like the memory of your voice saying ‘happiness’. I close my eyes looking for the secret meeting-place of the waters under the ice the sea’s smile, the closed wells groping with my veins for those veins that escape me there where the water-lilies end and that man who walks blindly across the snows of silence. I’ve kept a rein on my life, with him, looking for the water that touches you heavy drops on green leaves, on your face in the empty garden, drops in the motionless reservoir striking a swan dead in its white wings living trees and your eyes riveted. This road has no end, has no relief, however hard you try to recall your childhood years, those who left, those lost in sleep, in the graves of the sea, however much you ask bodies you’ve loved to stoop under the harsh branches of the plane trees there where a ray of the sun, naked, stood still and a dog leapt and your heart shuddered, the road has no relief; I’ve kept a rein on my life. The snow and the water frozen in the hoofmarks of the horses.

I have seen the Brown Recluse Spider run with a net in her hand, or rather, what resembled a net, what resembled a hand. She ran down the gleaming white floor of the bathtub, trailing a frail swirl of hair, and in it the hull of a beetle lay woven. The hair was my wife’s, long and dark, a few loose strands, a curl she might idly have turned on a finger, she might idly have twisted, speaking to me, and the legs of the beetle were broken.