64
PARTISAN REVIEW
Poem
From a magician's midnight sleeve
The radio-singers
Distribute all their love-songs
Over the dew-wet lawns.
And like a fortune-teller's
Their marrow-piercing guesses are whatever you believe.
But on the Navy-Yard aerial I find
Better witnesses
For love on summer nights.
Five remote red lights
Keep their nests there; Phoenixes
Burning quietly, where the dew cannot climb.
Quai D'Orleans
Each barge on the river easily tows
A mighty wake,
A giant oak-leaf of gray lights
On duller gray;
And behind it real leaves are floating by,
Down to the sea.
Mercury-veins on the giant leaves,
The ripples, make
Key West.
For the sides of the quai, to extinguish themselves
Against the walls
As softlras falling-stars come to their ends
At a point in the sky.
The throngs of small leaves, real leaves, trailing them,
Go drifting by
To disappear as modestly, down the seas'
Dissolving halls.
We stand as still as stones to watch
The leaves and ripples
While light and nervous water hold
Their interview.
"If
what we see could forget us half as easily,"
I want to tell you,
"As it does itself.-But for life we'll not be rid
Of the leaves' fossils."
ELIZABETH BISHOP
