Motley Kamuka

I still can see, though ten white winters lean Between me and the flowers in your hand, Our happiness that vanished summer day, Our captured hope and valor as we stand Under some trees and wave across the summer. Infected by its margins, soon or late All wild things fade away. See how the trees Crumble toward nothing like the last thin scrawls In letters of goodbye; see how the lawn Descends nowhere; and how the luck is over There at the stricken center where we wait With half our smiles, and all our magic gone. And the white terror moves on, lapping inward, Like mist, like silence, that will take it all. Ten years away and wondering what to do, I search my spirit for some flush of pain. But thought by thought the quiet moments fall. My heart, my heart is blank as hills of snow! — And all time leads us toward that last december .. . I stare upon your crumbling smile and keep you. I do not love you now, but I remember. In a Far Summer What can be returned? Time will not curve. The moon,...

On the Escape of a Dream (from No Voyage  1963) Trees pull up their polished roots and run; Rivers, if they please, pause in their flight. Birds hover and sing in syllables; Lovers and friends, in curious masks, glide over the lawn. The moon and stars wander the sky with the sun. And I am persuaded how all these familiars, that seem In some awful pressure to speak and fear of telling, Have turned earth into the heart’s empirical city, And hide in gallop and gilt the thread of logic Offered in the rapid illogical lectures of dream .. . I remember traveling in a gingham land: I see the dragon in the dragonfly; I open up the wind-wry fruit and find The paper heart of apples. Only the blood Reads it like sediment, can understand. I remember spectrums flooding my blinkered gaze. I dance with creatures wrapped in dominoes, I marvel the high trees in which, unheeded, In anagrams or arabic, the birds Sing on, sing on the chapters of my days. And when the birds splash in their leaves a...