“One man wrote me, saying, ‘You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!’”

Led them across a busy street—two lines of traffic.
He started a lost colony for his parents.

He bought her a heart-shaped box of chocolates
Once a year. One life, one woman,

You and I live here, along with many furry moles.
You and I have nowhere to live but with the moles;
We owe the mortgage on the house of Sorrow.

Whenever Jesus appears at the murky well,
I am there with my five hundred husbands.
It takes Jesus all day to mention their names.

I agree, O heart, that my poetry is not easy to take in.

Just put a wineglass and some wine in front of me;
Words will fall out of my mouth like apple blossoms.

Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat!
My shoulder is against yours.

The great doors remain closed, but the spring fragrance
is inside anyway

Then I arrived at the capital, vaguely saturated
with fog and rain. What streets were those?
The garments of 1921 were breeding

I keep a blue bottle.
Inside it an ear and a portrait.
When the night dominates

The long waves boom in the naked Norwegian caves, 
Men with gray hair come, men 
Like Polynesians, their long hair is like bark falling from a waterfall, 

If we go back, if we walk into the old darkness. 
And find Washington brooding under the long bridges,
We will find the dead still ablaze in the anguish of the egg,

Bracelets, jade, rubies, teak, silver chain armlets,
Topaz, smoking sapphire, diamond tortoises of gold, 
Columbus glimpsed them behind the green hills before he died;

If we are truly free and live in a free country,
When shall I be without this heaviness of mind?
When shall I have peace? Peace this way and peace that way?

Sound of thigh bones dancing 
Wakes the West. There,
There are the gold bones, there

The shrouded figure struggling to break from the coffin;
The sea giving out muffled cries by night;
The black hose damning the wild river.

Out of the jetty slip the dark bark rides, 
As I more leave, each day, the man-leafed tree, 
Hearing the Norse tell how they sail the sea.

Today, autumn.
Heaven’s roots are still.
O holy trees, rejoicing ruin of leaves

I’ve heard the sea upon the troubled rocks
Waste this past night, with dreams more troubled still,
And where the images that you and I

For peace and peace and peace the prayers ascend

From tongues in darkness sung to tongues in light

In death

The dove returns; it found no resting place;
It was in flight all night above the shaken seas;
Beneath ark eaves

When I wake, the sheep are eating apple peels just outside the screen, the trees are heavy, soaked, and hushed, the sun just rising. All seems calm, and yet somewhere inside I am not calm. We live in wooden buildings made of two by fours, making the landscape nervous for a hundred miles.