P o e m s

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

When You are Old
By W.B. Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love flase or true,
One man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
and his face amid a crowd of stars.

The Second Coming
By W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of the innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indifnant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Leda and the Swan
By W.B. Yeats

A sudden blow; the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can these terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agammemnon dead.

Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Sunrise, Interchange, Ithaca

Night was fat, forgiving.
Dawn coming on is mean,
anorexic, watery pink
behind the landlocked
regatta of car lots,
its daylight leaching
like a cheap cosmetic.
Night was the deep
channel, horizonless.
Morning, the road is a hard
bowel, a bad cough.
Did I say it is cold?
An attendant comes round
the salt-eaten, adamant islands,
working a purple rag.
His breath is a thin plume
auguring the air.
To him we are no one.
Wind wars with
the snapping pennants,
shapes itself to us
like an hour when
everything is cast.
Hands clasped on small cups,
we cauterized our tongues
with the steaming,
oil-colored fluid.
Even the map flaps to be off,
the tangled chromatic
of our way weaves
implacably across it,
wine-dark, of course.

In the Night of the Heart

The hours to think,
that is the worst,
night in a grip at my throat,
silence thicker than blood,
my skin pinned in brittle chips,
flat and thin as tinfoil.
Each tick of mind is a peak
I plunge from, hauled back
by the dream of drowning,
the car going down in that green
and my strapped sons sinking
just past my reach,
the cold roaring into our mouths,
their soft hair lifting,
blurring, disappearing.

It is not that love has no meaning,
it is simply useless.
there is no one it can save.
Your smell is no longer the same
as when we first made love,
our arms no longer fit our bodies
as they did. We kiss
out of a memory of kissing.
My hand along your cheek
is comfort I might give
to anyone. By day we are
mostly polite, we do
what needs to be done.
By night the place behind my eyes
yawns wide as the stalker's sack.

I want to crawl across the broken
glass of the bed, cut myself
on the barbed wire of your shoulders,
find some foothold in your spine.
But is does not happen like that.
love, like pain, is true
at last in the teeth.
It is not the body
but words that bleed
slowly, imperceptibly, away.
Mostly they go out without cry.
There is nothing much
later to point to.
The end is unspeakable,
this terror without sound,
a mouth cracking open
in the dark.

Slow Dance

Have you ever watched kids
on a merry-go-round
Or listened to the rain
slapping on the ground?

Ever followed a butterfly's
erratic flight
Or gazed at the sun
into the fading night?

You better slow down
Don't dance so fast
Time is short
The music won't last

Do you run through each day
on the fly
When you ask "How are you?"
do you hear the reply?

When the day is done,
do you lie in your bed
With the next hundred chores
running through your head?

You'd better slow down
Don't dance so fast
Time is short
The music won't last

Ever told your child,
"We'll do it tomorrow"
And in your haste,
not see his sorrow?

Ever lost touch,
Let a good friendship die
'Cause you never had time
to call and say "Hi"?

You'd better slow down
Don't dance so fast
Time is short
The music won't last

When you run so fast
to get somewhere
You miss half the fun
of getting there.

Life's not a race.
Please take it slower
Hear the music now
Before the song is over.