Poems

WALK the silver night together,
Silver full within your eyes.
Never ask the moonlight whether
It will linger in the skies.

Never ask the moment whether
Love is lasting. Have no care:
Walk the silver night together.
Moons are everlasting there.

AND they who listened wept,
The pitying, patient dead
Who were themselves deceived.
In unbelief they crept
To the sweet wailing lyre,
And for a time they grieved,
Who had such longing fled,
Who had forgot desire.
And for the song, they wept.

“Do what you love,” he said. “Pursue your life.”
And having no mind for trifles, or a wife,
He borrowed a narrow axe and built his hut
To live alone in, loving aloneness. But,
Aware of preferences like yours and mine,
‘Do what you love,” he said, and cut white pine
And shaped his own world, one within his means,
Then in a smaller clearing planted beans.

Even for love, he schemed and raised moro fuss
Than would occur offhand to most of us,
Desiring more: the time for sitting still,
Companions of the loon and whippoorwill,
A margin to his days, the woods, the pond,
Room to pursue and circle, look beyond,
Look to his life. For Thoreau would improve
The nick of time, he said, and in it move.

And screaming jay, each bullfrog, came to be
Part of this beautiful economy.