Even in sleep your shadow watches, me 
Your whisper rustles through the sleeping room 
As though you moved in silks. Why keep on trying? 

      Tourists would photograph
The sky’s long ribs in their eagerness 
     To snatch the whole

In black and green and white one candle burns
Upon some pages, under a lute that leans
Against a wall. Outside the window pine

Stone lips to the unspoken cave;
Fingering the nervous strings, alone,
I crossed that grey sill, raised my head

Another night of lunacy!
Another full and drunken moon
And I the dwarf and she the bear

At the end of October a mallard
came down
                to the lake’s edge

Back to her own devices now she turns,
Watches the objects shadowed by their stillness;
The vase stands upright where the first light falls,

The echoes held him, hugged him, hurled him down,
And above all October seemed to shout:
‘You worried you with what it’s all about.

The night has made the apple tree a scent,
A motion in my ear, as if delight
Ever so softly trembled in decline.

The good man went his way in personal freedom;
His body shone as if by his consent;
He had no king, and was himself his kingdom;