tori

There is a word

Which bears a sword

Can pierce an armed man -

It hurls its barbed syllables

And is mute again -

The Soul selects her own Society — Then — shuts the Door — To her divine Majority — Present no more —

I never told the buried gold

Upon the hill- that lies-

I saw the sun - his plunder done

Crouch low to guard his prize.

Love - thou art Veiled-

A few - behold thee-

Smile-and alter-and prattle-and die-

Bliss - were an Oddity - without thee-

Nicknamed by God-

Eternity-

All the pages of all the books

are blank.

It's a big secret.

The readers say nothing about it

to each other.

They had a secret

Which they were about to

Make known to me,

And then didn’t.

The sun pointed to one or two

Things that had survived

The long night intact,

The simplest things

On the first page of my dreambook

It’s always evening

In an occupied country.

Hour before the curfew.

A small provincial city.

The houses all dark.

Sometimes the

green pasture

of the mind

tilts abruptly.

The grazing horses

struggle crazily

Past cure I am, now reason is past care, 

And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;

My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,

At random from the truth vainly expressed:

It is not the moon, I tell you.

It is these flowers

lighting the yard.

Inconceivably solemn!

Things so gay

Pierce - by the very Press

Of Imagery-

Unit, like Death, for Whom?

True, like the Tomb,

Who tells no secret

Told to Him-

Over the still world, a bird calls

waking solitary among black boughs.

You wanted to be born; I let you be born.

When has my grief ever gotten

in the way of your pleasure?

Like all images, these were the conditions of a pact:

on your cheek, tremor of sunlight,

my finger pressing your lips.