Put on, I beg you, charms made of feathers.
                                                         -Czeslaw Milosz, "A Magic Mountain"
 
And then I beg You, take this heart of mine,
give to me, not begging any more,
Your feathery dawns, Your callous forehead,
the wing-sweep of Your mind.  Re-make me
with love's monuments of flowers in worlds
forever meets in the flight of a bird.
 
Feather me Your spells, pouch me in your bag
of amulets and charms.  Make me one of those
proclaiming: Here I am, working magic
in the words of sun and rain, of trees down
rootward there in Your own chambers of the lost.

-first published in Little Star
 

 
What's Hollowed Out


Mass diversions on the breakneck highway,
those larks of moments left of other pasts,
old loves, old flowers in the garden time
when you were queen and I was on the bridge
you wouldn't cross.  Not I, divine new life,
was going to trip you up with wasted time.
 
Long sequesters with those naked slaves: hearts
in disarray at any port that stood
hot shadowed on the road to mad July.
 
Come in, you darkling wind, we said, come in
and be the breath of us who'll haunt and ride
you so to sleep, where we'll dream of places lost,
where at the windows only black peers in
with eyes more cold (or were they warm?)
than what the crowblack wings of even God
would ever bring again so close and clear.

-first published in Little Star