Yet you return, bring beauty to Earth. I see
The skill and wonder you practice upon our eyes.
.creak the veiled branches. Still, in the single leaf
It
holds you, silken, a garland.
o
returning child, not knowing why you were born,
Not understanding world's beauty the dead sustain,
The sharpness of color, the clearness of water are yours;
The love there shadowed you know not.
What first I feared as a rite I love as a sacrament.
The Spring returns. I look. There is no dissembling.
The brook falters, runs on. I divine those meanings,
Listening to tongues that arc silent.
Rosalind Levine
UNTITLED SONNET
Under the white clock shaped like a teapot
Onyx faucets freshet lanes of hair.
Women are making a meaning of their faces
Unmistakable as a bud in air.
Daffodil vendors cry their wilted voices;
Bloodroot oozes along the teeth of the harrow.
Making a sensual flutter of wind and wings,
Five times the sparrow treads the female sparrow.
What shall I wear under the news-stand awning's
Striped obituary and madrigal -
That you may know me? Because I have heard
Milliners stitch summer above loud sills,
Continents toss in their sleep, and myself emerge
Earthwise from a long love-affair with words.
