A Birthday - by
I never felt so much
/ Since I have felt at all
/ The tingling smell and touch
/ Of dogrose and sweet briar,
/ Nettles against the…
I never felt so much
/ Since I have felt at all
/ The tingling smell and touch
/ Of dogrose and sweet briar,
/ Nettles against the…
‘It sounds very very high’
/
/ and she sobs for the joy of it,
/ for the reds and blues of it,
/ the shock, the…
I am sending a message again.
/ Maybe you can’t hear it
/ through all the noise of lights
/ and the dangerous way things…
The last place for a waterfall, no mountains or valleys,
/ horizons flat as summer seas, then from thirty miles,
/ a white tower…
I da dizzied hoose, a strum of flechs baet
/ endless drums fornenst a frenzied window.
/ Belligerent, dey want nedder in nor oot.
/
/ Apö…
Not bones but muscular air
/ inside; why starfish spread
/ five doll small living fingers
/ with cushion button dimples
/ for knuckles. All of…
Turned seventy, and not wanting
/ to waste the years left, half-asleep,
/ I’m stocking the shelves of a larder.
/
/ Each day is an empty…
Remember when you turned cartwheels / in the schoolyard. / And danced down the length / of the fallen tree,…
Cavernous – and empty now – / no shouts of dockers, / no barefoot women shovelling / molasses – it…
The slight hearing loss / we each suffer from / means we sometimes / fail to catch the sense /…
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
/ Are heap’d for the belovèd’s bed;
/ And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
/ Love itself…
we have to go call a taxi
/ the light by the store isn’t working
/ the night is black
/ the moon is dark tonight
/ I…
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