Now every leaf, though colorless,… With disembodied and celestial lig… And drops without a movement or a… A pillar of darkness to the shifti… The lucent, thin, and alcoholic fl…

The calloused grass lies hard Against the cracking plain: Life is a grayish stain; The salt-marsh hems my yard. Dry dikes rise hill on hill;

On the desert, between pale mounta… Far whispers creeping through an a… Coyote, on delicate mocking feet, Hovers down the canyon, among the… His voice running wild in the wind…

From the high terrace porch I wat… No light appears, though dark has… Sunk from the cold and monstrous s… Lie naked but not light. The dark… Down the remoter gulleys; pooled,…

My mother Foresaw deaths And walked among Chrysanthemums, Winecolored,

I could tell Of silence where One ran before Himself and fell Into silence

The night was faint and sheer; Immobile, road and dune. Then, for a moment, clear, A plane moved past the moon. O spirit cool and frail,

The young are quick of speech. Grown middle-aged, I teach Corrosion and distrust, Exacting what I must. A poem is what stands

Where am I now? And what Am I to say portends? Death is but death, and not The most obtuse of ends. No matter how one leans

Europe: 1944 as regarded from a great distance Impersonal the aim Where giant movements tend; Each man appears the same;

I, one who never speaks, Listened days in summer trees, Each day a rustling leaf. Then, in time, my unbelief Grew like my running—

Amid the iris and the rose, The honeysuckle and the bay, The wild earth for a moment goes In dust or weed another way. Small though its corner be, the we…

Dear Emily, my tears would burn y… But for the fire-dry line that mak… Burning my eyes, my fingers, while… Singly the words that crease my he… If I could make some tortured pil…

God spoke once in the dark: dead s… in the dead silence. I turned in my sleep.       I slept and sank away. Then breath by breath I rose