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Close by the jerkwater rancheros tonight, the round gloom longs, a window in the gloom, an attitude in the window, a pleading in the attitude, an unwitnessed ravishment in the pleading. A man stands there in the window thinking about how naked the water looks, thinking the water looks like emptiness, it looks like nothing. His heart aches to think how many gamblers have broke down on this highway? How many princesses of ice? I know I'm suburban, I've got a shitty whiskey in my hand, I work a job like eating a knife . . . Everyone's sperm all over my life, the sad waiting. Here's to the simple and endless desperate person lifting this glass. •  •  • If you imagine you're at the base of a cross coming out of your chest, that its vertical beam is a café and its crossbeam a bar of inebriates running along the rear of the café, that you're in a soft booth in the vertical beam of the cross facing a blonde over whose shoulder you happen to glance at the instant the TV above the bar broadcasts the unmistakable image of fate, the Vietnamese man getting a bullet shot into his ear, then you understand that I had to stop eating my squid stew. I started to cry. Susan tried to make some gesture, baby playing in front of the cobra's den, and it was enough: I was lodged in the moment, we were the treasure. •  •  • Sweet heat each breath of air, sugar of fire, and yet Dark said she was my date. She told me Don't be late. I guess it is our fate here in the mental hospital of passion and forgetting to scream inside the dream, put back the suicide, stand upon the corner starkly lit by the beam of memory from the face of a friend amid the glass of a toast, and wait that wait. •  •  • But I always come back to the corner of feelings and the sponge of vinegar. What is made with the hands rises up to seize us and press every word to its service so that I can never look at anything that hasn't been talked about a thousand times already, but I saw him screw his face up like a child in suspense of some mischief, and they blew his brains out. Your homework is more important than Cub Scouts. His head jerks. There's a blue-and-white menu by Susan's left hand. He collapses as if full of sand. You'd better settle down and eat. At the next table before his mother the boy in the Cub Scout uniform settles down and eats.

(i.m. Charles Leslie Stevenson, 1909-79) This House Which represents you, as my bones do, waits, all pores open, for the stun of snow. Which will come, as it always does, between breaths, between nights of no wind and days of the nulled sun. And has to be welcome. All instinct wants to anticipate faceless fields, a white road drawn through dependent firs, the soldered glare of lakes. Is it wanting you here to want the winter in? I breathe you back into your square house and begin to live here roundly. This year will be between, not in, four seasons. Do you hear already the wet rumble of thaw? Stones. Sky. Streams. Sun. Those might be swallows at the edge of sight returning to last year's nest in the crook of the porchlight. Complaint 'Dear God,' they write, 'that was a selfish winter to lean so long, unfairly on the spring!' And now — this too much greed of seedy summer. Mouths of the flowers unstick themselves and sting the bees with irresistible dust. Iris allow undignified inspection. Plain waste weeds dress up in Queen Anne's lace. Our mist- blue sky clouds heavily with clematis. 'Too much,' they cry, 'too much. Begin again.' The Lord, himself a casualty of weather falls to earth in large hot drops of rain. The dry loam rouses in his scent, and under him — moist, sweet, discriminate — the spring. Thunder. Lightning. He can do anything. Between The wet and weight of this half-born English winter is not the weather of those fragmentary half-true willows that break in the glass of the canal behind our rudder as water arrives in our wake — a travelling arrow of now, of now, of now. Leaves of the water furl back from our prow, and as the pinnate narrow seam of where we are drives through the mirror of where we have to be, alder and willow double crookedly, reverse, assume a power to bud out tentatively in gold and yellow, so it looks as if what should be end of summer — seeds, dead nettles, berries, naked boughs — is really the anxious clouding of first spring. ...'Real' is what water is imagining. Stasis Before the leaves change, light transforms these lucid speaking trees. The heavy drench of August alters, things; its rich and sappy blood relaxes where a thirst ago, no rest released the roots' wet greed or stemmed their mad need to be more. September is the wisest time — neither the unbearable burning word nor the form of it, cooped in its cold ghost. How are they sombre — that unpicked apple, red, undisturbed by its fall; calm of those wasp-bored amethyst plums on the polished table? Body and head easy in amity, a beam between that must, unbalanced, quicken or kill, make new or dead whatever these voices are that hate the dust. The Circle It is imagination's white face remembers snow, its shape, a fluted shell on shoot or flower, its weight, the permanence of winter pitched against the sun's absolute root. All March is shambles, shards. Yet no amber chestnut, Indian, burnished by its tent cuts to a cleaner centre or keeps summer safer in its sleep. Ghost be content. You died in March when white air hurt the maples. Birches knelt under ice. Roads forgot their ways in aisles of frost. There were no petals. Face, white face, you are snow in the green hills. High stones complete your circle where trees start. Granite and ice are colours of the heart.

I thought once how Theocritus had sung Of the sweet years, the dear and wished for years, Who each one in a gracious hand appears To bear a gift for mortals, old or young: And, as I mused it in his antique tongue, I saw, in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware, So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair, And a voice said in mastery, while I strove, ... Guess now who holds thee?'—Death,' I said. But there, The silver answer rang ... Not Death, but Love.'

If thou must love me, let it be for nought Except for love's sake only. Do not say I love her for her smile ... her look ... her way Of speaking gently, ... for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine, and certes brought A sense of pleasant ease on such a day'— For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought, May be unwrought so. Neither love me for Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry,— A creature might forget to weep, who bore Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby! But love me for love's sake, that evermore Thou may'st love on, through love's eternity.

Beloved, my Beloved, when I think That thou wast in the world a year ago, What time I sate alone here in the snow And saw no footprint, heard the silence sink No moment at thy voice ... but, link by link, Went counting all my chains, as if that so They never could fall off at any blow Struck by thy possible hand ... why, thus I drink Of life's great cup of wonder! Wonderful, Never to feel thee thrill the day or night With personal act or speech,—nor ever cull Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull, Who cannot guess God's presence out of sight.

When our two souls stand up erect and strong, Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher, Until the lengthening wings break into fire At either curvéd point, — what bitter wrong Can the earth do to us, that we should not long Be here contented ? Think. In mounting higher, The angels would press on us, and aspire To drop some golden orb of perfect song Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay Rather on earth, Belovèd, — where the unfit Contrarious moods of men recoil away And isolate pure spirits, and permit A place to stand and love in for a day, With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.

I lived with visions for my company, Instead of men and women, years ago, And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know A sweeter music than they played to me. But soon their trailing purple was not free Of this world's dust, — their lutes did silent grow, And I myself grew faint and blind below Their vanishing eyes. Then THOU didst come ... to be, Belovèd, what they seemed. Their shining fronts, Their songs, their splendours, (better, yet the same, As river-water hallowed into fonts) Met in thee, and from out thee overcame My soul with satisfaction of all wants — Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.

My letters! all dead paper, ... mute and white ! — And yet they seem alive and quivering Against my tremulous hands which loose the string And let them drop down on my knee to-night. This said, ... he wished to have me in his sight Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring To come and touch my hand ... a simple thing, Yet I wept for it! — this, ... the paper's light ... Said,Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed As if God's future thundered on my past. This said,I am thine— and so its ink has paled With lying at my heart that beat too fast. And this ... O Love, thy words have ill availed, If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!

If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange And be all to me? Shall I never miss Home-talk and blessing and the common kiss That comes to each in turn, nor count it strange, When I look up, to drop on a new range Of walls and floors ... another home than this? Nay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is Filled by dead eyes too tender to know change? That's hardest. If to conquer love, has tried, To conquer grief, tries more ... as all things prove; For grief indeed is love and grief beside. Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love. Yet love me—wilt thou? Open thine heart wide, And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove.

First time he kissed me, he but only kissed The fingers of this hand wherewith I write, And ever since it grew more clean and white,... Slow to world-greetings...quick with its “Oh, list,” When the angels speak. A ring of amethyst I could not wear here plainer to my sight, Than that first kiss. The second passed in height The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed, Half falling on the hair. O beyond meed! That was the chrism of love, which love’s own crown, With sanctifying sweetness, did precede. The third, upon my lips, was folded down In perfect, purple state! since when, indeed, I have been proud and said, “My Love, my own.”