Spring Cries
Our worst fears are realized.
Then a string of successes, or failures, follows.
She pleads with us to stay: "Stay,
just for a minute, can't you?"
We are expelled into the dust of our decisions.
Knowing it would be this way hasn't
made any of it easier to understand, or bear.
May is raving. Its recapitulations
exhaust the soil. Across the marsh
some bird misses its mark, walks back, sheepish, cheeping.
The isthmus is gilded white. People are returning
to the bight: adult swimmers, all of them.
CHARLES TOMLINSON
Varenna
Waiting for the ferry
we watch the late sun
gilding inordinately
the lakeside town
and the lake itself,
as if to insist that we
need look no further:
immanence is mystery
where the column of sundown
reflects in a vertical
tall encroachment
like flickering oil,
