Reader unmov’d and Reader unshaken. Reader unsedc’d
and unterrified, through the long-loud and the sweet-still
I creep toward you. Toward you, I thistle and I climb.

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.

Dawn was their greeting time.
Welcome back, he said quietly.

It's Papa's coat she's wrapped in,
his old wool Lodenmantel, like a child

wrapped in a blanket of green leaves,

All night, wind out of the Pentlands
around the chimney flue made sounds
like thunder, and I lay thick

The light of the moment becoming a memory—
that was their subject: as if the present
could be haunted by its own nostalgia.

Hath stored from the beginning
the spies and counter-worlds
within the foot, at the instep's

Beyond our seed-littered pond a small forest of bamboo grows wild.
Hear the wind-rustling like shaken paper? Bamboo.