suspended in amber mist
I feel the house open to you
spreading rose through capillaries
rising to enclosing softness
I wake and find you here
you came after all.

2/02/75

at the turn

seawater sun-warmed saturates the earth
sea-mother/earth lover
calling you home

blackbirds white collared
have put the world on backwards
pointed you away from me

this is the day to turn your back
on blackbirds in dead trees
squawking toward the void
erase their hard black delineations

touch down
the horizon once again becomes
primeval mist of joining.

8/21/75

Calypso's captive

island of warm light
drops to deep center darkness
Calypso's cave
vines tendril you fast
sinuating muscles
tighten
draw inward inward
now pull o pull against
your sliding retreat
a slow pattern of tides
sucked in
reluctantly released

Calypso sings
be home here
be done with wrath
be home here
with flowers

1/01/1975

One of Your Stockings
for John Gordon

One of your stockings dropped
out of the sweater I put on today.
It had clung there since last spring
when our wash was together.
One of those black ones
with a thin green band across the toe.

It made me smile
to remember your perennial lament:
"Fifty socks and never two alike!"

I put it by itself into an envelope
and addressed it to you,
allowing myself no message with it.
Nothing except the thin green smile
of a lone sock.

4/01/83. Published in Windfall in 1995