Denise Levertov

From the tawny light from the rainy nights from the imagination finding itself and more than itself alone and more than alone at the bottom of the well where the moon lives, can you pull me into December? a lowland of space, perception of space towering of shadows of clouds blown upon clouds over new ground, new made under heavy December footsteps?the only way to live?

Come into animal presence. No man is so guileless as the serpent. The lonely white rabbit on the roof is a star twitching its ears at the rain. The llama intricately folding its hind legs to be seated not disdains but mildly disregards human approval. What joy when the insouciant armadillo glances at us and doesn't quicken his trotting across the track into the palm brush. What is this joy? That no animal falters, but knows what it must do? That the snake has no blemish, that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings in white star-silence? The llama rests in dignity, the armadillo has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest. Those who were sacred have remained so, holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence of bronze, only the sight that saw it faltered and turned from it. An old joy returns in holy presence.

The clouds as I see them, rising urgently, roseate in the mounting of somber power surging in evening haste over roofs and hermetic grim walls— Last night as if death had lit a pale light in your flesh, your flesh was cold to my touch, or not cold but cool, cooling, as if the last traces of warmth were still fading in you. My thigh burned in cold fear where yours touched it. But I forced to mind my vision of a sky close and enclosed, unlike the space in which these clouds move— a sky of gray mist it appeared— and how looking intently at it we saw its gray was not gray but a milky white in which radiant traces of opal greens, fiery blues, gleamed, faded, gleamed again, and how only then, seeing the color in the gray, a field sprang into sight, extending between where we stood and the horizon, a field of freshest deep spiring grass starred with dandelions, green and gold gold and green alternating in closewoven chords, madrigal field. Is death’s chill that visited our bed other than what it seemed, is it a gray to be watched keenly? Wiping my glasses and leaning westward, clearing my mind of the day’s mist and leaning into myself to see the colors of truth I watch the clouds as I see them in pomp advancing, pursuing the fallen sun.

Brown gas-fog, white beneath the street lamps. Cut off on three sides, all space filled with our bodies. Bodies that stumble in brown airlessness, whitened in light, a mildew glare, that stumble hand in hand, blinded, retching. Wanting it, wanting to be here, the body believing it’s dying in its nausea, my head clear in its despair, a kind of joy, knowing this is by no means death, is trivial, an incident, a fragile instant.    Wanting it, wanting with all my hunger this anguish, this knowing in the body the grim odds we’re up against, wanting it real. Up that bank where gas curled in the ivy, dragging each other up, strangers, brothers and sisters.    Nothing will do but to taste the bitter taste. No life other, apart from.

The ache of marriage: thigh and tongue, beloved, are heavy with it, it throbs in the teeth We look for communion and are turned away, beloved, each and each It is leviathan and we in its belly looking for joy, some joy not to be known outside it two by two in the ark of the ache of it.