For a while
Let it be enough:
The responsive smile,
Though effort goes into it.
Across the warm room
Shared in candlelight,
This look beyond shame,
Possible now, at night,
Goes out to yours.
Hidden by day
And shaped by fires
Grown dead, gone gray,
That burned in other rooms I knew
Too long ago to mark,
It forms again. I look at you
Across those fires and the dark.
Last night my soul cried, “O exalted sphere of Heaven, you hang indeed inverted, with flames in your belly.
“Without sin and crime, eternally revolving upon your body in its complaining is the indigo of mourning;
“Now happy, now unhappy, like Abraham in the fire; at once king and beggar like Ebrahim-e Adham.
“In your form you are terrifying, yet your state is full of anguish: you turn round like a millstone and writhe like a snake.”
Heaven the blessed replied, “How should I not fear that one who makes the Paradise of the world as Hell?
Last night I drove a car
Last night I dreamed of chickens,
there were chickens everywhere,
they were standing on my stomach,
they were nesting in my hair,
they were pecking at my pillow,
they were hopping on my head,
they were ruffling up their feathers
as they raced about my bed.
They were on the chairs and tables,
they were on the chandeliers,
they were roosting in the corners,
they were clucking in my ears,
there were chickens, chickens, chickens
for as far as I could see...
when I woke today, I noticed
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
Last
night
thin
rain,
gusty
wind.
Dense
sleep
doesn't
fade
a wine
hangover.
I'm talking
to her
who
rolled up
the curtains.
Are you
blind!
I
say.
By now
they're
fat
green
and skimpy
red.
Come, let us tell the weeds in ditches
How we are poor, who once had riches,
And lie out in the sparse and sodden
Pastures that the cows have trodden,
The while an autumn night seals down
The comforts of the wooden town.
Come, let us counsel some cold stranger
How we sought safety, but loved danger.
So, with stiff walls about us, we
Chose this more fragile boundary:
Hills, where light poplars, the firm oak,
Loosen into a little smoke.
I know that the day will come
when my sight of this earth shall be lost,
and life will take its leave in silence,
drawing the last curtain over my eyes.
Yet stars will watch at night,
and morning rise as before,
and hours heave like sea waves casting up pleasures and pains.
When I think of this end of my moments,
the barrier of the moments breaks
and I see by the light of death
thy world with its careless treasures.
Rare is its lowliest seat,
rare is its meanest of lives.
"Tell us a story of these Isles," they said,
The daughters of the West, whose eyes had seen
For the first time the circling sea, instead
Of the blown prairie's waves of grassy green:
"Tell us of wreck and peril, storm and cold,
Wild as the wildest." Under summer stars
With the slow moonrise at our back, I told
The story of the young Norwegian, Lars.
That youth with the black eyebrows sharply drawn
In strong curves like some sea-bird's wings outspread
O'er his dark eyes, is Lars, and this fair dawn
Languid, and sad, and slow, from day to day
I journey on, yet pensive turn to view
(Where the rich landscape gleams with softer hue)
The streams and vales, and hills, that steal away.
So fares it with the children of the earth:
For when life's goodly prospect opens round,
Their spirits beat to tread that fairy ground,
Where every vale sounds to the pipe of mirth.
But them vain hope and easy youth beguiles,
And soon a longing look, like me, they cast
Back on the pleasing prospect of the past:
