If it’s spring in the city, have the marchers,
each one with a shrieking whistle, short-circuited the streets,
their cause as grave as the dirty cabs growling at their feet?

Puma, cougar, mountain lion, loup—
   this is what I am afraid of. Ocarina,
small singing goose in the break-ax

The log-crammed trucks smash the yielding air,
Whine like leviathan gnats.
Last week a trucker died at the wheel

  Imagine our nation is a giant boy,
down on his knees in a giant kitchen—
trucks and trains and stupendous armies
marching across the mop-clean floor.

You must not show her face. Only the hands
where each granite planetary knuckle
slowly pales as if submerged in water, stripped down as after seizure,
those hands that now hold nothing.

Somehow I know, I know these things,
such as when I will have a shepherd’s
bad luck, forever the same horrible creed
of a hunter, and my heart starts to bleed.

Tree

All the chemical deeds
Of a tall beech in the rain;

If, in depicting the angels, I cannot
avoid something, as well, of what
the river that day cast before me,
the musculature of the rowers’ arms,

Wild asters. A blue
wasp shudders in the gravel.
Laundry on the line:
yesterday, the day before.

For so long, I have wanted relatively nothing
Except, perhaps, this chance to write it down:
Here, for example, near a fire in a cold house,
A wide, full valley out my window