It is a willow when summer is over… a willow by the river from which no leaf has fallen nor bitten by the sun turned orange or crimson.

When I am alone I am happy. The air is cool. The sky is flecked and splashed and wound with color. The crimson phalloi of the sassafras leaves

The rose is obsolete but each petal ends in an edge, the double facet cementing the grooved columns of air ——The edge

Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Which sky? The sky where Watteau hung a lady’s slipper. Your knees

The dayseye hugging the earth in August, ha! Spring is gone down in purple, weeds stand high in the corn, the rainbeaten furrow

It is still warm enough to slip from the weeds into the lake’s edge, your clothes blushing in the grass and three small boys grinning behind the derelict hearth’s side. But summer...

A middle-northern March, now as a… gusts from the South broken agains… but from under, as if a slow hand… it moves—not into April—into a sec… the old skin of wind-clear scales…

Of asphodel, that greeny flower, like a buttercup upon its branching stem– save that it’s green and wooden– I come, my sweet,

Pour the wine bridegroom where before you the bride is enthroned her hair loose at her temples a head of ripe wheat is on

Winter is long in this climate and spring—a matter of a few days only,—a flower or two picked from mud or from among wet leaves or at best against treacherous

Here it is spring again and I still a young man! I am late at my singing. The sparrow with the black rain on… has been at his cadenzas for two w…