Each day the purple clematis climbs further up the wire beside the kitchen door
Green fingers twine around the strands of wire
And soon there is another blossom with a yellow star at its center

Sometimes when I am working 
In the forest clearing brush from 
The hemlocks, a wood nymph approaches 

Make It Simple

make it so simple a child
of six can understand the

Callow and amorphous, not gods
but adjectives flung at the sun
whose hot fibers protest their distance

Roll me in protective layers
of yourself, wool scarves.
Take me out in the snow.

City air makes a man free 
To cut his own throat or that
Of his neighbor across the way.

Love in a maze destroyed his force
Regretting free and sunny days.
He mastered compass, chart and course

But if, after so many droning days, 
You try to imagine a quiet country 
Under the soft crush of the tide, 

On the hottest day of the year I rode the mail
To Waterloo Strand and Seaside Macedon
Where, tanned like Egyptians in their Louis-Quatorze

Cold, cold … 
In the end it began to snow 
Mercifully, like bandages