“One man wrote me, saying, ‘You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!’”

It’s a good idea to figure what to do with parents. 
One man I knew, after caring for them for years, 

Whenever Jesus appears at the murky well,
I am there with my five hundred husbands.
It takes Jesus all day to mention their names.

I agree, O heart, that my poetry is not easy to take in.
When they hear my work, experienced poets
Suggest I should write something easier to understand.

The world I see looks to me like a game of children.
Strange performances and plays go on night and day.
King Solomon’s throne is not a big thing to me.

What comes out of the harp? Musk!
And there is a dance no hands or feet dance.
No fingers play it, no ears hear it,

Then I arrived at the capital, vaguely saturated
with fog and rain. What streets were those?
The garments of 1921 were breeding

I keep a blue bottle.
Inside it an ear and a portrait.
When the night dominates

The long waves boom in the naked Norwegian caves, 
Men with gray hair come, men 
Like Polynesians, their long hair is like bark falling from a waterfall, 

If we go back, if we walk into the old darkness. 
And find Washington brooding under the long bridges,
We will find the dead still ablaze in the anguish of the egg,

Bracelets, jade, rubies, teak, silver chain armlets,
Topaz, smoking sapphire, diamond tortoises of gold, 
Columbus glimpsed them behind the green hills before he died;

If we are truly free and live in a free country,
When shall I be without this heaviness of mind?
When shall I have peace? Peace this way and peace that way?

The shrouded figure struggling to break from the coffin;
The sea giving out muffled cries by night;
The black hose damning the wild river.

Sound of thigh bones dancing 
Wakes the West. There,
There are the gold bones, there

Out of the jetty slip the dark bark rides, 
As I more leave, each day, the man-leafed tree, 
Hearing the Norse tell how they sail the sea.

Today, autumn.
Heaven’s roots are still.
O holy trees, rejoicing ruin of leaves

I’ve heard the sea upon the troubled rocks
Waste this past night, with dreams more troubled still,
And where the images that you and I

For peace and peace and peace the prayers ascend

From tongues in darkness sung to tongues in light

In death

The dove returns; it found no resting place;
It was in flight all night above the shaken seas;
Beneath ark eaves

When I wake, the sheep are eating apple peels just outside the screen, the trees are heavy, soaked, and hushed, the sun just rising. All seems calm, and yet somewhere inside I am not calm. We live in wooden buildings made of two by fours, making the landscape nervous for a hundred miles.