We wait
Through long and yearning years
For discovering kiss,
The awakening.
Dreaming within forested castles,
We wait;
Aware, yet unaware,
That only the gleam
Of towers and turrets can be seen
Above the green and guardian leaves.
From the hushed dark waters
of the river at night
a murmur rises:
How lonely!
Past the high hollow laughter
of the vagrant crowd
a whisper surprises:
How lonely!
In the mind’s deep caverns
an echo resounds
at every crisis:
How lonely!
I tried to write myself
into the river,
but the river instead
wrote itself into me.
She turned always
to a sun of long ago—
a memory of something
perhaps that was never so
exactly what she insisted to recall—
and though
the sun of that memory shed
some overcast of color,
there emanated from the petals
a too-rich scent
an insidious hint
that deep into the roots,
invisible
there sullied and spread
the wasting,
a draining of life to death
He turned always
to her—she was his sun—
and though
he did not flower
as he might have done
in the fullness of real sunlight
his blossoms, lacking glow,
were pale but sturdy
and smiled
almost content to be shadowed so
From root-base of love, a bright
stream coursed upward for him
in a steady, life-giving flow
Leaf-green shadows wait
on sea-green for melting snow-
gold to pass: full moon
Because the fever flames forever within,
We somehow, somewhere, sometime
Must begin to climb
The wounded weed-infested street
Exploring every empty house
In prescient fear
That nothing will be all that comes
To greet us in the grass-grown yards.
No secret one appears
To swing in splashing sun on derelict gates
Or leap with laughter from the ancient halls
Moldering behind the half-hung doors.
Nobody waits in silent surprise
Beside the crumbling walls.
No ear to hear, can there still be sound?
No eye to see, where is light’s playground?
Love? And no heart to feel:
Who then pleads blindly:
Please, somebody,
Please come and find me.
—For Sylvia Plath
I wonder if it was
that he could not endure
that if not more, not less
was what she brought
and truer;
a rightful match
a mind and soul to catch
his star-flung thought
to soar
if not beyond at least as far
I wonder if it was
just envy, fear
that made him count it less
to be so mated near
when what he wanted most
was a certain awe
and worshipful tear
One thing we know:
the starcrossed paths divergence made
and she was left alone
This thing we know:
he reached and took life’s easy trade
she inherited a stone
A feather blows by
Choreographed in blue light
Wind flowing softly
The golden harp sings
A blossom adorns the tree
Grass grows from the ash
Once in time in the sunlight land
South of the border and the Rio Grande
A heart could turn to the children at play
Where laughter was sweet as dawn of day
But the hours moved on and the sun burned down
And the laughter of children no longer is found
In the places or fields of their destroyed town.
A heart may long for that enchanted sound
And may search the shadows of faded light
Lured by memory, but while dark is supreme
The children like birds in their feathered night
Will be silent as they sleep and dream
For a morning to blossom sunshine bright
With music and songs (the darkness all gone)
With carefree laughter: sounds to delight
A heart with joy in a new rainbow dawn