Music
This shape without space, This pattern without stuff, This stream without dimension Surrounds us, flows through us, But leaves no mark. This message without meaning, These tears without eyes This laughter without lips Speaks
Night Piece
Climb, claim your shelf-room, far Packed from inquisitive moon And cold contagious stars. Lean out, but look no longer, No further, than to stir Night with extended finger. Now fill the box with light,
Meeting
Dogs take new friends abruptly and by smell, Cats’ meetings are neat, tactual, caressive. Monkeys exchange their fleas before they speak. Snakes, no doubt, coil by coil reach mutual knowledge. We then, at first
Cats
Cats no less liquid than their shadows Offer no angles to the wind. They slip, diminished, neat through loopholes Less than themselves; will not be pinned To rules or routes for journeys; counter Attack
Black On Black
Serrations of chimneys Stone-black perforate Velvet-black dark. A tree coils in core of darkness. My swinging Hands Incise the night. A man slips into a doorway, Black hole in blackness, and drowns there. A
Empty Room
The clock disserts on punctuation, syntax. The clock’s voice, thin and dry, asserts, repeats. The clock insists: a lecturer demonstrating, Loudly, with finger raised, when the class has gone. But time flows through the
June Sick Room
The birds’ shrill fluting Beats on the pink blind, Pierces the pink blind At whose edge fumble the sun’s Fingers till one obtrudes And stirs the thick motes. The room is a close box
Cocoon For A Skeleton
Clothes: to compose The furtive, lone Pillar of bone To some repose. To let hands shirk Utterance behind A pocket’s blind Deceptive smirk. To mask, belie The undue haste Of breast for breast Or
One Almost Might
Wouldn’t you say, Wouldn’t you say: one day, With a little more time or a little more patience, one might Disentangle for separate, deliberate, slow delight One of the moment’s hundred strands, unfray Beginnings
Day Dream
One day people will touch and talk perhaps Easily, And loving be natural as breathing and warm as Sunlight, And people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted, Unfold and yawn and stretch and
Last Word To Childhood
Ice-cold fear has slowly decreased As my bones have grown, my height increased. Though I shiver in snow of dreams, I shall never Freeze again in a noonday terror. I shall never break, my
The British
We are a people living in shells and moving Crablike; reticent, awkward, deeply suspicious; Watching the world from a corner of half-closed eyelids, Afraid lest someone show that he hates or loves us, Afraid
Birch Tree
The birch tree in winter Leaning over the secret pool Is Narcissus in love With the slight white branches, The slim trunk, In the dark glass; But, Spring coming on, Is afraid, And scarfs
Chaplin
The sun, a heavy spider, spins in the thirsty sky. The wind hides under cactus leaves, in doorway corners. Only the wry Small shadow accompanies Hamlet-Petrouchka’s march – the slight Wry sniggering shadow in
Quickstep
Acknowledge the drum’s whisper. Yield to its velvet Nudge. Cut a slow air- Curve. Then dip (hip to hip): Sway, swing, pedantically Poise. Now recover, Converting the coda To prelude of sway-swing- Recover. Acknowledge