"Mary's Voice"

I feel the quiet spheres
depending from her palm;
they move among our
intermittent breaths

Cowper on Acer platanoides in Massachusetts

This maple's modest bloom, the green
That hazes naked limbs like dancers' gauze
Across our Wampanoag waters; green
Of calyx and corolla crowding out
The tiny gold of pistil-tips to trick
Or almost trick us into reading all
As common leafage. Yesterday I walked
Around the Kentish graveyard, Scituate,
Wherein the massy winds my bike had worked
Against to get me there had shaken down
A thousand maple blossoms, strewing them
Like wedding-toss among the figured stones.

η χαρά του Πάσχα

Friend choose friend from
Shore-trash, sea-heave, crush, Kit
Smart calls out Creation's help in
Hymning Him. I concur, demur, praise
Her, a blur of lines – between tone & tone, reed &
Voice, taste & dream, here & now: Bill
Billings, nightingale, sang Boston in its
Eventide, before the Human Face for
Cinerary salix got exchanged, a dirty
Deal. In ink off photoglyph gravures that acid
Etched against resists of egg-white mixed
With dichromate of potash we can see &
Smell the rutted road, the horse, its
Shit, her shirt & skirt, his broad-mouthed
Grin. This luminescence is unboundable by
Any boneyard's moss; trees fruit for this, fill
Baskets – olives, almonds, apples, ten bushels
Excellent Endicott pears to Mr
Harts Horne for grave stoons. I
See the rise of dory against painter, see the
Rise of land against blue sky, of palmate
Maple, pinnate oak, and Absalom in cambium ever
Dying inward, ever swelling outward, weaving
Wood.

Anteater

Tides trending outward complicate the land. The chug of an overburdened Hampton boat cuts a track into the heavy liquid element, setting up an off-rhyme against the matters of a growing shore.

From this village to the next is only three Petersburg versts (fifteen hundred arshins, a quick walk): but your little apple-house where I want so badly to visit you — regularly, regularly! — is fifty or sixty whole seventeenth-century versts away! If we compose the village in our hearts it will not hurt us so much that we are not homesteading in it. If I take a well-weighted little machete — one of those ones they sell at the ferretería by parque Morazán, the blade not more than fifty or sixty barleycorns long — and I whack & thwack a while on a split-out piece of heartwood pruned off your big old Collins tree, the one behind the outhouse, and Lou loans me her crooked-knife, I could work up a good set of spoons for us all to use with the star-&-heart guacales for our birthday soup Sunday.