Tracing

O those years! The green light of morning

and the still unswept pavements of pleasure—

summer yelled from every surface of the city

and supped at a horn

refilled from above.

Silent hour. Watery colors

of a pale green eye’s diluted stream

pictures in that magic green, glass dances,

shepherds and streams, a dome, pigeons—

woven, dispatched, shining, faded—

mutable clouds of happiness!

So you faced the day: the font

without bubbles, dawdling

buildings and staircases; the houses

locked up, it was for you to create

the morning, early jasmine,

its yelps, its incipient aboriginal

stream—still without end—O those years!

Something unquenchable in the heart,

complement to heaven and earth;

playing to you from reeds and gardens,

evening storms

drenched the brassy umbels,

darkly they burst, taut with seeds,

and sea and strands,

wimpled with tents,

full of burning sand,

weeks bronzing, tanning everything

to pelts for kisses landing

indiscriminately like cloudbursts

and soon over!

Even then

a weight overhead

grapes bunching

you pulled down the boughs and let them bounce up,

only a few berries

if you wanted

first—

not yet so bulging and overhung with

plate-sized fruit,

old heavy grape flesh—

O those years!

                                ii

Dark days of spring,

unyielding murk in the leaves;

drooping lilacs, barely looking up

narcissus color, and smelling strongly of death,

loss of content,

untriumphant sadness of the unfulfilled.

And in the rain

falling on the leaves,

I hear an old forest song,

from forests I crossed

and saw again, but I didn’t return

to the hall where they were singing,

the keys were silent,

the hands were resting somewhere

apart from the arms that held me,

moved me to tears,

hands from the eastern steppes,

long since trampled and bloody—

only the forest song

in the rain

dark days of spring

the everlasting steppes.