| One leaves his leaves at home being a mullen and sends up a lighthouse to peer from: I will have my way, yellow—A mast with a lantern, ten fifty, a hundred, smaller and smaller as they grow more—Liar, liar, liar! You come from her! I can smell djer-kiss on your clothes. Ha, ha! you come to me, you—I am a point of dew on a grass-stem. Why are you sending heat down on me from your lantern—You are cowdung, a dead stick with the bark off. She is squirting on us both. She has had her hand on you!—Well?—She has defiled ME.—Your leaves are dull, thick and hairy.—Every hair on my body will hold you off from me. You are a dungcake, birdlime on a fencerail.— I love you, straight, yellow finger of God pointing to—her! Liar, broken weed, duncake, you have— I am a cricket waving his antenae and you are high, grey and straight. Ha! |
WAITING
| When I am alone I am happy. The air is cool. The sky is flecked and splashed and wound with color. The crimson phalloi of the sassafrass leaves hang crowded before me in shoals on the heavy branches. When I reach my doorstep I am greeted by the happy shrieks of my children and my heart sinks. I am crushed. Are not my children as dear to me as falling leaves or must one become stupid to grow older? It seems much as if Sorrow had tripped up my heels. Let us see, let us see! What did I plan to say to her when it should happen to me as it has happened now? |
THE HUNTER
| In the flashes and black shadows of July the days, locked in each other’s arms, seem still so that squirrels and colored birds go about at ease over the branches and through the air. Where will a shoulder split or a forehead open and victory be? Nowhere. Both sides grow older. And you may be sure not one leaf will lift itself from the ground and become fast to a twig again. |
ARRIVAL
| And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom— feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind...! |