Dour river
Jaded with monotony of lights
Diving off mast heads.... 
Lights mad with creating in a river... turning its sullen back... 
Heave up, river... 
Vomit back into the darkness your spawn of light.... 
The night will gut what you give her.

SECRETS

INTERIM

The earth is motionless
And poised in space... 
A great bird resting in its flight
Between the alleys of the stars. 
It is the wind’s hour off.... 
The wind has nestled down among the corn.... 
The two speak privately together,
Awaiting the whirr of wings.

AFTER STORM

Was there a wind?  Tap... tap...  Night pads upon the snow with moccasined feet... and it is still... so still... an eagle’s feather might fall like a stone.  Could there have been a storm... mad-tossing golden mane on the neck of the wind... tearing up the sky... loose-flapping like a tent about the ice-capped stars?

Cool, sheer and motionless the frosted pines are jeweled with a million flaming points that fling their beauty up in long white sheaves till they catch hands with stars.  Could there have been a wind that haled them by the hair.... and blinding blue-forked flowers of the lightning in their leaves?  Tap... tap... slow-ticking centuries...  Soft as bare feet upon the snow... faint... lulling as heard rain upon heaped leaves....  Silence builds her wall about a dream impaled.

SECRETS

Secrets infesting my half-sleep... did you enter my wound from another wound brushing mine in a crowd... or did I snare you on my sharper edges as a bird flying through cobwebbed trees at sun-up carries off spiders on its wings?

Secrets, running over my soul without sound, only when dawn comes tip-toeing ushered by a suave wind, and dreams disintegrate like breath shapes in frosty air, I shall overhear you, bare-foot, scatting off into the darkness....  I shall know you, secrets by the litter you have left and by your bloody foot-prints.

POTPOURRI

Do you remember
Honey-melon moon
Dripping thick sweet light
Where Canal Street saunters off by herself among quiet trees? 
And the faint decayed patchouli—­
Fragrance of New Orleans
Like a dead tube rose
Upheld in the warm air... 
Miraculously whole.

THAW

Blow through me wind
As you blow through apple blossoms.... 
Scatter me in shining petals over the passers-by.... 
Joyously I reunite... sway and gather to myself.... 
Sedately I walk by the dancing feet of children—­
Not knowing I too dance over the cobbled spring. 
O, but they laugh back at me,
(Eyes like daisies smiling wide open),
And we both look askance at the snowed-in people
Thinking me one of them.