“[As a child] I was so fascinated by these watercolors in a book about Indians that I began teaching myself to read the captions . . . So I associate learning to read English . . . with wanting to know about Indians. I'm still growing into it.

For a few years I had a garden in a ruined village. I worked through the long summer afternoons on a limestone upland full of the sound of cicadas, in a place that I had found.

But there is only one of you
they say as though they knew
and it may even be true

The sun was touching the wet black shoulders of olives
in a chipped dish descended from another century
on that day I remember more than half my life ago

You have been evoked so often
like some relative in office
whom we have heard of by name

You with a muse of your own
in the old gallery
that profile of grave beauty

You who waited here before me
in silence mothers of silence
I always knew you were present

With the birds I suppose there is
small comparison no holding
up of what may be remembered

It was that other land that we
could believe in for a long time
knowing that it used to be there

Not every kind of water will do
to make the pool under the rock face
that afterward will be clear forever

Last night with our minds still in cold April
in the late evening we watched the river
heavy with the hard rains of the recent spring

It is said that after he was seventy
Ingres returned to the self-portrait
he had painted at twenty-four and he

A sentence continues after thirty years
it wakes in the silence of the same room
the words that come to it after the long comma

Once a child's poem began a pond of time
what followed must have flowed from what a child

How did someone come at last to the word for patience
and know that it was the right word or patience

Long after Ovid’s story of Philomela
   has gone out of fashion and after the testimonials
of Hafiz and Keats have been smothered in comment

These junipers growing out from the yellow rocks
   now in the sunlight near the top of the steep slope
under its split cliff face and these dwarf oaks returning

The ice again in my sleep it was following someone
   it thought was me in the dark and I recognized its white 
                                                                                            tongue

 When they start to wear your clothes
do their dreams become more like yours
who do they look like

They say the sun will come back
at midnight
after all
my one love

 

When you were born
I was a small child in a bad time
and even if somebody had brought me news of you
I might not have believed them

Wherever I look you are islands
a constellation of flowers breathing on the sea
deep-forested islands mountainous and fragrant

Turning climbing slowly in late spring among
black trunks of high pines
talking of our lives few white words flying

Wherever I look you are islands
a constellation of flowers breathing on the sea
deep-forested islands mountainous and fragrant

Wherever I look you are islands
a constellation of flowers breathing on the sea
deep-forested islands mountainous and fragrant

The harvest was over. Even the scythe had not been mine. I had nowhere to go.

In the evening I found a girl lying on the ground like a sheaf of wheat, radiant and silent. When I bent over her she was watching me, smiling.

It is nothing new
for horses to be harnessed to hemispheres
it has happened at intervals

A man was able to get hold of all the laughter in the world, and he packed it tightly and locked it up in his house, and hid the key.

Look at you bringing 
Your children up just as formerly 
And look at me back again 

Look at you bringing 
Your children up just as formerly 
And look at me back again 

Look at you bringing 
Your children up just as formerly 
And look at me back again 

I gave you sorrow to hang on your wall 
Like a calendar in one color. 
I wear a torn place on my sleeve. 

I remember how I would say, “I will gather 
These pieces together, 
Any minute now I will make 

You were always a stray and grating
Stiff-necked lot, I am sure of it; graceless,
And nothing loose about your hands.

This is the one that will outlive us all
With her head in the same duster and her small
Mouth maybe puckering in a bit more

We walked on it, in the very flesh
No different only colder, as was
The sea itself. It was simple as that.

Two boards with a token roof, backed
Against the shelving hill, and a curtain
Of frayed sacking which the wind absently

There is an archipelago rising
Out of the green waters that, rippling
And swaying, are the oak tree’s shadow

Late in March, in the year I would turn thirty, he wrote me a letter about sea monsters.

He and I had never met, and he addressed me, on the stationery of The Nation magazine, formally, with a colon after my name, and signed himself George G. Kirstein, over his title, Publisher.

 

They say that after seven years every cell in your body has changed. You are a different person. I wish I could remember what day it was, in July 1949, that I landed in Genoa. Or the day (one or two days before?) when we first came in sight of the Spanish coast.