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Bid me to live, and I will live Thy protestant to be; Or bid me love, and I will give A loving heart to thee. A heart as soft, a heart as kind, A heart as sound and free, As in the whole world thou canst find, That heart I'll give to thee. Bid that heart stay, and it will stay, To honour thy decree; Or bid it languish quite away, And 't shall do so for thee. Bid me to weep, and I will weep, While I have eyes to see; And having none, yet I will keep A heart to weep for thee. Bid me despair, and I'll despair, Under that cypress tree; Or bid me die, and I will dare E'en death, to die for thee. Thou art my life, my love, my heart, The very eyes of me; And hast command of every part, To live and die for thee.

As from the house your mother sees You playing round the garden trees, So you may see, if you will look Through the windows of this book, Another child, far, far away, And in another garden, play. But do not think you can at all, By knocking on the window, call That child to hear you. He intent Is all on his play-business bent. He does not hear; he will not look, Nor yet be lured out of this book. For, long ago, the truth to say, He has grown up and gone away, And it is but a child of air That lingers in the garden there.

The night reduced to a siren, a sigh: Beautiful boy on the treadmill Glimpsed sweating through sweating glass— My new moon. Sylvia’s moon: a smiling skull Snagged in witchy branches; fossil Brushed free of blackest earth. My last moon: an orange ball at rest, for an instant, On the grey lake. Wish list: dining set and dresser, Boombox, thin black tie, boy- Friend à la Madonna’s “True Blue” La la la la la la la Your moon (tonight): a clouded X-ray. I stand at a corner and stare up, Both of us astonished By its own secret light.

Are there two things, of all which men possess, That are so like each other and so near, As mutual Love seems like to Happiness? Dear Asra, woman beyond utterance dear! This love which ever welling at my heart, Now in its living fount doth heave and fall, Now overflowing pours thro’ every part Of all my frame, and fills and changes all, Like vernal waters springing up through snow, This Love that seeming great beyond the power Of growth, yet seemeth ever more to grow, Could I transmute the whole to one rich Dower Of Happy Life, and give it all to Thee, Thy lot, methinks, were Heaven, thy age, Eternity!

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring Conspiring Working together; literally, to conspire is “to breathe together” (OED) with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves thatch-eves Thatch-eaves, the edge of thatched roofs run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing winnowing Separating the wheat from the chaff, the heavy from the light wind; Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook hook Scythe Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner gleaner One who gathers the remaining food after the reaper has harvested the field thou dost keep Steady thy laden laden Loaded down head across a brook; Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? Where are they? Rhetorical convention known as ubi sunt , often appearing in poems that meditate on the transitory nature of life and the inevitability of death. Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— While barred clouds bloom bloom “to colour with a soft warm tint or glow” (OED) the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains stubble-plains Fields made up of stubble, the remaining stumps of grain left after reaping with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows sallows Willow trees , borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft garden-croft A croft is a small enclosed field ; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

We met in a coastal village spent a lovely night without leaving an address going separate ways. Three years later we meet again by coincidence. The whole three years spun a novel we abandoned: They fail to recognize themselves as though meeting in another story for an encounter. One asks: Who are you, so cold and weary The other says: I only know a thread is loose on my sweater The more you pull it, the more it lengthens until I completely vanish.

I I heard a small sad sound, And stood awhile among the tombs around: "Wherefore, old friends," said I, "are you distrest, Now, screened from life's unrest?" II —"O not at being here; But that our future second death is near; When, with the living, memory of us numbs, And blank oblivion comes! III "These, our sped ancestry, Lie here embraced by deeper death than we; Nor shape nor thought of theirs can you descry With keenest backward eye. IV "They count as quite forgot; They are as men who have existed not; Theirs is a loss past loss of fitful breath; It is the second death. V "We here, as yet, each day Are blest with dear recall; as yet, can say We hold in some soul loved continuance Of shape and voice and glance. VI "But what has been will be — First memory, then oblivion's swallowing sea; Like men foregone, shall we merge into those Whose story no one knows. VII "For which of us could hope To show in life that world-awakening scope Granted the few whose memory none lets die, But all men magnify? VIII "We were but Fortune's sport; Things true, things lovely, things of good report We neither shunned nor sought ... We see our bourne, And seeing it we mourn."

To be held by the light was what I wanted, to be a tree drinking the rain, no longer parched in this hot land. To be roots in a tunnel growing but also to be sheltering the inborn leaves and the green slide of mineral down the immense distances into infinite comfort and the land here, only clay, still contains and consumes the thirsty need the way a tree always shelters the unborn life waiting for the healing after the storm which has been our life.

The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

Bubblegum lip gloss kissed,                Our lifelines, our mirrors, I was never a singkil princess            These are Luminous Mysteries — Knuckle cracking, polished toes,        Our notebooks, our language, I was never a Santacruzan queen      To witness, to make way, Black eyeliner, push up bra                  Our thirst and our wedding bands — I was never a curtsying debutante    To fill stone jars with water, to wed, Loud, gum-smacking babygirl             Our glamour and our armor. I was never a tiaraed Miss Fil Am     To transfigure, dazzling as the sun.