SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
Dad reads aloud. I follow his finger across the page.
Sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space.
He makes the Moon say something new every night
to his deaf son who slurs his speech.
On moonlight night
when moon is bright
Beware, Beware—
Moon-Gazer man
with his throw-back head
and his open legs
gazing, gazing
up at the moon
Draw a line through our scattered bodies. The pattern of fallen calves in this meadow will mirror
the constellation above. Look up. We whip our tails to a silent song:
Give me a few more hours to pass
With the mellow flower ofthe elm-bough falling,
And then no more than the lonely grass
And the birds calling.
Give me a few more days to keep
A view from two sides of Polaris, it is said:
somewhere a little girl is reading aloud
in the middle of a dirt road. she smiles
at the sound of her own voice escaping
the spine of a book. she feeds on her hunger
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
A work of art is a world of signs, at least to the poet’s
nursery bookshelf sheltered behind the artist’s ear.
I recall each little motto howling its ins and outs
to those of us who might as well be on the moon
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
love is a moontime teaching
is your kookum’s crooked smile when you pick up the phone
is another word for body
body is another word for campfire smoke
Come when the nights are bright with stars
Or when the moon is mellow;
Come when the sun his golden bars
Drops on the hay-field yellow.
Come in the twilight soft and gray,
take the moon
nd take a star
when you don’t
know who you are
paint the picture in your hand
nd roll on home
take my fear
nd take the hunger
take my body
Would I have seen her?
The tide tugging her gently past
the Comfort Inn; houses, tall and gabled,
Praise the rain, the seagull dive
The curl of plant, the raven talk-
Praise the hurt, the house slack
Here at Woodlands, Moriah,
these thirty-five years later,
still I could smell her fear.
sometimes I find myself
weeping
at the oddest moment
Rain at Muchalat, rain at Sooke,
And rain, they say, from Yale to Skeena,
And the skid-roads blind, and never a look
About me the night moonless wimples the mountains
wraps ocean land …
My bands of silk and miniver
Momently grew heavier;
The black gauze was beggarly thin;
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; —
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
I
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
A startled stag, the blue-grey Night,
Leaps down beyond black pines.
Behind — a length of yellow light —
For weeks and weeks the autumn world stood still,
Clothed in the shadow of a smoky haze;
The fields were dead, the wind had lost its will,
So, we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
