poetry

• pale grew thy cheek and cold,

  colder thy kiss
• i hear thy name spoken,

  and share in its shame
• how should i greet thee -

  with silence and tears
• she put my arm around her waist,

  and made her smooth white shoulder bare,

  and all her yellow hair displaced,
• from pride, and vainer ties dissever,

  and give herself to me for ever
• that moment she was mine, mine, fair

  perfectly pure and good:
• except the struggling green which hides the wood. Yet, o my palm-tree, be it understood.
• and let these bands of greenery which insphere thee [...]

  burst, shattered, everywhere!
• i do not think of thee - i am too near thee
• his knuckles singing as they reddened in the warmth
• is your life more real because you dig and sow?
• it's you who sends me word of that other world

  pouring air and light into an envelope
• i chose a maid - too young maybe - but more's to do at harvest time than bide and woo
• "not near, not near" her eyes beseech
• but what to me?
• the soft young down of her, the brown,

  the brown of her - her eyes, her hair, her hair!
• like a satellite wrenched from its orbit,

  go drifting away behind a scatter of boys
• with the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
• i have had worse partings, but none that so

  gnaws at my mind still.
• mother, any distance greater than a single span,

  requires a second pair of hands
• unreeling years between us. anchor. kite.
• your fingertips still pinch the last one-hundredth of an inch
• i decide to do it free, without a rope or net [...]

  pushing into the weave, trying to get a grip.
• warm ice [...]

  the glassy ridge of a scar [...]

  at his still firm shoulder
• reaching for the summit, where gasping for breath I can only lie..