Nobody in the lane, and nothing, n
Blackberries on either side, thoug
A blackberry alley, going down in
Somewhere at the end of it, heavin
Big as the ball of my thumb, and &

Search thou my heart;
If there be guile,
It shall depart
Before thy smile.
Search thou my soul;

Those blessèd structures, plot and
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:

The stiff spokes of this wheel

touch the sore spots of the earth.
On the Potomac, swan—white

power launches keep breasting the
Otters slide and dive and slick ba

Nautilus Island’s hermit
heiress still lives through winter
her sheep still graze above the se
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;

Your nurse could only speak Itali
but after twenty minutes I could i
and tears ran down my cheeks....
When I embarked from Italy with m
the whole shoreline of the Golfo d

Now that I kneel at the throne, O
Pity and pardon me.
Much have I striven to sing the s
Brother of beast and tree;
Yet when the stars catch me alone

… his soul in his despite.
I told the father all …

I was thinking of a son.
The womb is not a clock
nor a bell tolling,
but in the eleventh month of its l
I feel the November

Here in this valley of discrete ac
We have not mountains, but mounts,
To the Adirondacks, to northern M
Themselves mere rocky hillocks to
Still, they’re out best mustering

Compelled by calamity’s magnet
They loiter and stare as if the ho
Burnt—out were theirs, or as if th
Some scandal might any minute ooze
From a smoke—choked closet into li

The smile of iceboxes annihilates
Such blue currents in the veins of
I hear her great heart purr.
From her lips ampersands and perce
Exit like kisses.

Spry, wry, and gray as these Marc
Percy bows, in his blue peajacket,
He is recuperating from something
The narcissi, too, are bowing to s
It rattles their stars on the gree

There is this white wall, above wh
Infinite, green, utterly untouchab
Angels swim in it, and the stars,
They are my medium.
The sun dissolves on this wall, bl

Worship this world of watercolor m
in glass pagodas hung with veils o
where diamonds jangle hymns within
and sap ascends the steeple of the
A saintly sparrow jargons madrigal

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
God’s lioness,
How one we grow,

It is ten years, now, since we row
The sun flamed straight down that
That summer we wore black glasses
We were always crying, in our spar
In …

Who are these people at the bridge
The rector, the midwife, the sexto
In my sleeveless summery dress I
And they are all gloved and covere
They …

(I)
This is the sea, then, this great
How the sun’s poultice draws on my
Electrifyingly—colored sherbets, s
By pale girls, travel the air in s

I am sending back the key
that let me into bluebeard’s study
because he would make love to me
I am sending back the key;
in his eye’s darkroom I can see