[Thirteen Implements]

Do not allow me to sink, I said To a top floating ribbon of kelp. As I was lifted on each wave And made to slide into the vale I wanted not to drown. I wanted To make it all right with my dear, To tell my cat I’ll be away, To have them all destroyed, the poems Which were not objects enough on their own Even entertainment value. I wanted Through my saltwater breath to leave A bubble or two in its abstract sphere On the surface of their delicious minds. • Outside the window of the world The midges dance above a bush Making a complex music holding A language for which there is no key. That they are dancing there helps us To communicate even in the negative. • Time’s not funny enough to dash My hopes. I go in wide open To deal with its little team of tenses To try to win myself a stopped Place for an instant while I think. • I have left my place to come to speak To you. Now from this other place Inhabited by the very beast I brace myself to speak with good Tone that will carry. I love you. How does that sound? I was only testing. • Who murmurs me their secret name? Is it you? If you could do that You certainly would be better than me. Who I am, the name I hunt After has so far escaped me. The grammarsow or the waving rook Surely must think of me as somebody. • Ben Narnain was a love of mine, Going up beside the Soordook Burn And bracken and bog-myrtle. The water Ouzel dipped at the pools. The twite The mountain linnet caught the eye. From the top I saw the sword of the long Loch lying in its scabbard of hills. • Ideosyncracies of the way We speak eventually become Currency and only by Art Skip the expanded chest of rhetoric To speak nearly from one to another. • Younger my brash prison of joy Seemed to do me well enough. Now made modern with its new Benefits of experience I can hardly catch a glimpse Of that young sun and tree-top. My cell’s window has risen too high. • Is who’s listening who I guess It is? My dear it is so long Since I held your heart near. I wanted just to speak but now Hearing your little ear I know So well near me I am put off. Anyhow I was only going to try To assail some aspect of Reality. • The blemish is this, I think, I could I would have if I had known I really could but me knowing It maybe too well was not sure What it was I could and the words Were all against me and would not help. • Listening through the microscopes of power I heard a rebec under an olive Sing to me that certainly My wife would leave me and go down To live on the prose plains again. • This is a book. It is blue. Those are pages. They are black and white. That is a famous man. The worms Do not know his name or color. • I am here very much at four A.M. Am I in a deeper night Than you whose eyeballs observe terrible Encounters under your dream’s hill? I am only still up out of sleep Trying to burnish an implement With my mind’s elbow grease to pack In English and send off to you For you to put on the mantlepiece.