I am a garden graced by every beauty:
See my splendor, then you will know my being.
For Mohammad, my king, and in his name
The noblest things, past or to come, I equal:

Memory’s branch quivers
beneath the weight of a butterfly
How am I to know what it wants
without asking

 

A different tongue, you think,
would set you free. Imagine songs
you, disabused of old entanglements,
might sing. But only out of mastery;

Hunting along the logging road
swamped through to Pockwock Lake,
we stopped beside the spring to drink—
startled a drowsing snake.