Fat,
black, slick,
galloping in the pitch
of the waves, in the pearly
fields of the sea,

Today again I am hardly myself.
It happens over and over.
It is heaven-sent.
It flows through me
like the blue wave.

In winter
all the singing is in
the tops of the trees
where the wind-bird
with its white eyes

The feet of the heron,
under those bamboo stems,
hold the blue body,
the great beak
above the shallows

Come with me
into the field of sunflowers.
Their faces are burnished disks,
their dry spines
creak like ship masts,

Not quite four a.m., when the rapt
strikes me from sleep, and I rise
from the comfortable bed and go
to another room, where my books ar
in their neat and colorful rows. H

not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer’s n
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now—whenever
we’re not looking. Surely you can

Understand, I am always trying to
what the soul is,
and where hidden,
and what shape
and so, last week,

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your kn
for a hundred miles through the de
You only have to let the soft anim
love what it loves.

Needing one, I invented her—
the great-great-aunt dark as hicko
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.
Dear aunt, I’d call into the leav