Among petals pale as death And leaves steadfast in shape They sleep on, mouth to mouth. A white mist is going up. The small green nostrils breathe, And they turn in their sleep. Ousted from that warm bed We are a dream they dream. Their eyelids keep the shade. No harm can come to them. We cast our skins and slide Into another time.
New Yorker rejection of poems may smack me in the stomach any morning.
From another, distanced mind, I saw myself sitting on the breezeway, surrounded by two white clapboard walls, a mock orange bush and a clump of birches and a box hedge, small as a doll in a doll’s house.
146 Stars Over the Dordogne Stars are dropping thick as stones into the twiggy Picket of trees whose silhouette is darker Than the dark of the sky because it is quite starless. The woods are a well. The stars drop silently. They seem large, yet they drop, and no gap is visible. Nor do they send up fires where they fall Or any signal of distress or anxiousness. They are eaten immediately by the pines.
Began another big one, more abstract, written from the bathtub:.
The sheep know where they are, Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds, Gray as the weather. The black slots of their pupils take me in. It is like being mailed into space, A thin, silly message. They stand about in grandmotherly disguise, All wig curls and yellow teeth And hard, marbly baas.
If I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through their circles and semicircles, every night for seven nights, without missing a second, or a minute, or an hour.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God, Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Tomorrow what? Always patching masks, making excuses for having read a bare half of what I purposed. Yet a life is passing?
134 Parliament Hill Fields On this bald hill the new year hones its edge. Faceless and pale as china The round sky goes on minding its business. Your absence is inconspicuous; Nobody can tell what I lack.
I am back to a certain stoic stance: to begin again and write and read in the afternoons and evenings.
I could feel the tears start to spurt from the screwed-up nozzles of my eyes.
I picked up my pocketbook and started back over the cold stones to where my shoes kept their vigil in the violet light.
It is quite conversational sounding in spite of the elaborate 7-line pentameter stanzas rhyming ababcbc and is more ambitious than anything I’ve ever done, although I feel to be doing it like a patchwork quilt, without anything more than the general idea it should come out a rectangular shape, but not seeing how the logical varicolored pieces should fit.
If you only knew how the veils were killing my days. To you they are only transparencies, clear air.
At least it gets me out of that incredible sense of constriction which I have on trying to find subjects for small bad poems, and feeling always that they should be perfect, which gives me that slick shiny artificial look.
I shall move north. I shall move into a long blackness. I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman, Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack. I feel a lack. I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets. See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.
That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I want was infinite security. I want change and excitement and shoot off in all directions by myself.
Do you know what a poem is, Esther?” “No, what?” I said. “A piece of dust.
Buddy said he figured there must be something in poetry if a girl like me spent all her days over it, so each time we met I read him some poetry and explained to him what I found in it.