A Lyric

Autumn is dusk, brings dusk,
Dusk's grave adjustment of tones.

I have bathed, my fingers smell of money.

Greyness, stillness, chill—
Each is rich in itself.

The sea has fingers like these smallnesses,
These notes; those who are cold
It touches with odours.

Behind you hung a vast fund of cloud.

There dwindles on my eye
Your eye, the charm of clavicles.

You were as real as meat, as thunder.

Thirst

It is all these blooms withhold
That keeps them vivid—
One is a gramophone-horn.

I may walk to the airport.

I like to get up close
To silver skins with rivets,
To halted things made frank about their scale.

I know a bright tunnel
Containing demonstrations of its own
Insides, own functions.

Lemonade or sand:
Teach me which to drink.

The square, the park, the idle intersection
(Forever void of more than simply you)
Dare not move an inch.

Polygon Wood

'From tents on a plain
We were tempted out. To embark for this,
Not yet all mud.

'Mother, I am lost,
Am lost inside a map you enter through
A hole in a hedge.'

Soon winter will come and snow seem to repair
This medieval convent.

Because he is dad he is ready.

Because he is clad he deflects.

He will move forward untouched
Through all that is neutered and still.

Waking

This tinted gloom has prepared
To be thus unsurprised.

Slowly my radio grows
A tiny scarlet eye.

To be awake at all
is constantly to risk
Disaster, its agent,
The shadow of his sleeve
On my morning paper.

Opportunity

I think of rooms,
high-ceilinged and airy,
in which live single men.

It is morning.

Here chairs have arms
of coarse green breadth
and icons are pictures
cut from magazines.

It may be that water
winds into a basin
with a noise suggestive
of rinsings, dabblings.

Escape would make
as small a sound.