Easter

Last Easter, I gave my mother-in-law a large, brown, simple ceramic
            Navajo water pot, shiny with pine…

                                      PRIMEAt dawn, the shapes of cypresses in fog
Were fingers pointing up from graves, as if what's born…

This is the way it is. We see
three ages in one: the child Jesus
innocent of Jerusalem and Rome
- magically at home in joy -
that’s the year from which
our inner persistence has its force.

The second, Bergman shows us,
carries forward image after...

I’ll conjure the perfect Easter
& we’ll plant mini spruces in the yard—
my pink gloves & your green gloves
 
like parrots from an opera over the earth—
We’ll chatter about our enemies’ spectacular deaths.
I’ll conjure the perfect Easter
 
dark pesto sauce sealed with lemon
long...

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty...

I have met them at close of day   
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey   
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head   
Or polite meaningless words,   
Or have lingered awhile and said   
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done   
Of...

Even on Easter Sunday   
when the church was a

jungle of lilies and   
ferns fat Uncle Paul

who loved his liquor   
so would pound away

with both fists on the   
stone pulpit shouting

sin sin sin and the   
fiery fires of hell

and I cried all after-
noon the first time...

Little Lamb who made thee 
         Dost thou know who made thee 
Gave thee life & bid thee feed. 
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the...

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in...

Easter was the old North   
Goddess of the dawn.   
She rises daily in the East   
And yearly in spring for the great   

Paschal candle of the sun.   
Her name lingers like a spot   
Of gravy in the figured vestment   
Of the language of the Britains.   

Her...

They pay us time and a half
and don’t dare catch us
drinking: we don’t insist,
don’t pass a bottle, but each sips
a private pint, all sitting
in the narrow room with our backs
to the center, each facing
his work—router, stain tray,
buffing wheel, drill press—
and...

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
      Though foolishly he lost the same,
            Decaying more and more,
                  Till he became
                        Most poore:
                        With thee
                  O let me rise
            As larks, harmoniously,
      And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall...

I threaten'd to observe the strict decree
    Of my dear God with all my power and might;
    But I was told by one it could not be;
Yet I might trust in God to be my light.
"Then will I trust," said I, "in...

(Vienna) I

Shut out the light or let it filter through
These frowning aisles as penitentially
As though it walked in sackcloth. Let it be
Laid at the feet of all that ever grew
Twisted and false, like this rococo shrine
Where cupids smirk from candy clouds...

Her unawed face, whose pose so long assumed
Is touched with what reality we feel,
Bends to itself and, to itself resumed,
Restores a tender fiction to the real.

And in her artful posture movement lies
Whose timeless motion flesh must so conceal;
Yet what her...

The men that cut their graves in the grey rocks
Go down more slowly than the sun upon their dusty country:
White as the wall, the weepers leave the town,
To be the friends of grief, and follow
To the new tomb a widow’s...