To Charles, from Prison

When the crow, unseen
fills the sky with his blackened voice
and autumn ivy blazes on garden walls,
as the daylight fails,
as the chill evening falls,
thick mist brims the hollows of the earth
and I go walking in halted air.

My eyes are balked, but I can hear
my dog (as she noses through the greying light)
slash the leaves, a sound ahead. I probe
the mist and ground's decay with cold, stubbed fingers,
releasing in the moistened smell of rot
familiar ghosts.

I've spent the day, dear ghosts,
like wasted cash, and now the day
is gone, spilled into the throat of night.
I long for sight.

Ah, tenuous ghosts! beware,
the mind betrays its dearest joy.
I give my thoughts like leaves,
my thought decays, and what I need
I use, destroy.
Ah, tenuous ghosts, beware.

I will argue with you, ghosts, to keep you still,
but creatures with such meshy, vapoury minds
will not be caught. Ah, you! Indifferent
as the earth, rooted, cold and twice as
beautiful--to touch them twists the soul with doubt.

All truth roots in idiom, a self with all
the voices of its time--the kind of space I need
is the kind of space or air or ground--

Philosophers aren't worth a damn unless they
realize how life corrodes their thought. Poet!
Look at what I've found! I'll sing to my distractions
and net without an effort what you've sought.

Beauty should have no shame but
be be inadvertant musical
with secrets that are innocent
beyond the currents and the chords
of thought. The empty spaces that our
minds point to snare what's not.

Beauty should have no shame, yet here
the stubborn O and hole remain. You're
not much help.

O YOU
YOU who build and unbuild,
unmake and make me every day,
take oh take me up into your confidence!
The undeniable is filled to seething
with complexity. Ghosts
rise from the loam as the cool
grey morning penetrates the night
and quiver in the damp, absorbing light.
As though in sleep they groan
with small thick sounds,
the noises crows must make
when owls lurk in their brains.

Those who awake too soon
have dew for all their pains.
Wait for the warmer light,
when the sun puts the colour
of flesh into lifeless stone.
Outside, the air will be bright
and mellow, moving with something more
than the endlessly whisking leaves.
And there in the prospect of the yard
will be colours of yellow, blue, and
green, dazzling but gentle, pure,
and my soul will be the angel at the door
suffused with light and shadow,
a bright star at its chest,
whispering
come,
come...

here
here
here is everything.

The fecund plants that sprout from the living earth,
the rose, the locust, chestnut, and wild bee,
all the lush growth the hungry soil gives forth,
are pieces for a mind that needs to see,
are pieces for a soul that finds it power
in the luxury of the passing moment's height,
that yields to the complex music of each hour
the calm harmoniouness of perfect sight.

Here, here in my hand!
Is this what you found so hard,
so difficult to set to words and form?

I, sweet girl, am the grass you walk upon.
I feel your footsteps tear into my side.
the pale path that you leave will turn to dun
and earth be scarred, or so the green lust cried.

I, sweet girl, am the tree whose leaves you pluck.
My long roots grip and gather up the soil.
my lips suck water at the deepest rock,
yet I feel pain, and ooze sweet sap like oil.

My belly's filled with lust's sweet growing birth.
Marred innocence and grace have left me odd.
My soul grows thick and silent like the earth.
I think of Mary's secret, bearing God.

But ah, sweet girl! the very air about you
is mere inchoate flesh that must be worn.
Sing and the subtle forms that are without you
take up your soul and human beauty's born.