Always for the first time

Always for the first time I scarcely know you when I see you You return sometime in the night To a house at an angle to my window A wholly imaginary house From one second to the next There in the complete darkness I wait for the strange rift to recur The unique rift In the façade and in my heart The nearer I come to you In reality The louder the key sings in the door of the unknown room Where you appear alone before me First you merge with the brightness The fleeting angle of a curtain A jasmine field I gazed on at dawn on a road near Grasse The jasmine-pickers bending over on a slant Behind them the dark profile of plants stripped bare Before them the dazzling light The curtain invisibly raised In a frenzy all the flowers rush back in You facing this long hour never dim enough until sleep You as if you could be The same except I may never meet you You pretend not to know I’m watching you Marvellously I’m no longer sure you know it Your idleness fills my eyes with tears Meanings swarm around each of your gestures Like a honeydew hunt There are rocking-chairs on a bridge there are branches That might scratch you in the forest In a window on the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette Two lovely crossed legs are caught in long stockings Flaring out in the centre of a great white clover There is a silk ladder unrolled across the ivy There is That leaning over the precipice Of the hopeless fusion of your presence and absence I have found the secret Of loving you Always for the first time

On the road to San Romano

Poetry is made in a bed like love Its rumpled sheets are the dawn of things Poetry is made in the woods

It has the space it needs Not this one but the other shaped by

The hawk’s eye The dew on a horsetail The memory of a bottle frosted over on a silver tray A tall rod of tourmaline on the sea And the road of the mental adventure That climbs abruptly One stop and bushes cover it instantly

That isn’t to be shouted on the rooftops It's improper to leave the door open Or to summon witnesses

The shoals of fish the hedges of titmice The rails at the entrance of a great station The reflections of both riverbanks The crevices in the bread The bubbles of the stream The days of the calendar The St. John's Wort

The acts of love and poetry Are incompatible With reading a newspaper aloud

The course of a sunbeam The blue light linking the blows of an axe The kite string shaped like a heart or hoop net The beavers' tails beating in time The swiftness of lightning The casting of candy from the old stairs The avalanche

The room of marvels No gentlemen it is not a courtroom Nor the haze of a roomful of soldiers some Sunday evening

Figures of a dance transparent above the marshes The outline on the wall of a woman's body at daggerthrow The bright spirals of smoke The curls of your hair The curve of the Philippine sponge The twists of a coral snake The ivy into the ruins It has all the time it needs

The embrace of poetry like that of the flesh As long as it lasts Shuts out all the woes of the world

Get full access to good works at goodworks.substack.com/subscribe