The Poem of the Marrow

The eager wind is screaming for my bones.

It dreams of scattering ashes over rock

and soon will have its way.

The wind strikes sailor, canvas, and dune,

and all but the wind is changed or shifts.

Each moment plants new wrinkles in my brow

and cooler seasons in my blood.

Let me tend to the marrow of myself:

that which will one day cast off breath and bone

and spin blind as the one-eyed sun.

New Brunswick, 1968

This is one of my earliest poems, but I stand by it. In fact, it still has an appeal to me, almost as though someone else had written it. It knows what it wants to say and does so in a way that undoubtedly reflects all the Yeats and Dylan Thomas I was reading, while leaving room for my own voice to emerge a bit.

The Sun Lifts the Branches

The sun lifts the branches of the elm trees
into the flock of perched sparrows.
It wipes night from the wings of gulls, and,
where they glide, it steers the clouds.

It lifts the print from the page, the wind
through pine trees where each needle shines
enumerated in the light; it lifts
the curtain into the room it lights.

It lifts each object in the room into
heaven, one day at a time, then
drops everything into night, exhausted.
The dark that follows sets the leopard free.

At night I feel the sun drill towards my sleep
through the stone of the Great Wall.
In the kitchen, before dawn, its gas-jets hold
the kettle like a pair of hands.

New Brunswick, Spring 1976

Edgartown Midnight

                             For Janice

The poem ends, and we return to
the beach to let the moon affect us.
Edgartown lies silent, sleeps under sea-breeze,
Orion overhead cartwheeling.
Someone dreams just past that window.

And Orion and Diana pursue us
to the beach where we cannot tell
if it is Sappho's selanna or the moon
that kept up with the cars of our childhoods.

The light off wave-blue and eye-blue are brothers,
though when eyes and the shore combine
two distinct midnights darken.
But talk spills into both,
and if, for a moment, we inhabit
each other's morning, the horizon stretches
and the moon nearing it enlarges.

Now we lie silent and long
under moonlight's subtle abrasions,
as wave after wave falls forward,
and the tide sings through its stations.

• Another Martha's Vineyard poem
• Translations of Rilke, Sappho and other poets
• Review of two books by British poet John Greening