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Winter Garden
A permanent occasion Knotted into the clouds: pink, then blue, Like a baby holding its breath, or colorless As the gush and pop of conversations Under water. You feel handed from clasp to clasp, A concert carried off by the applause. Other times half of you is torn At the perforated line and mailed away. You want to say, "Today, the smithereens Must fend for themselves," And know the ever-skating decimal's joy, To count on thin ice Growing thinner by degrees, taking its own Sweet time and taking us with it, To navigate magnetic zones in which Intense ecstatic figures touch, like worlds, But don't collide, it being their devotion To depend on you to name for each A proper sphere. "Today, I turn to silence; Let the language do the talking." X the Unknown and his laughable, lovable crew, The tumbling balconies of one-of-us-is-a-robot- And-it's-not-me waves (Spanking a beach so empty If you weren't around to trip me Would I really fall?) and days When the wind is a bridge across our power To enumerate, to dig, to plant, to hold And to communicate the twill-and-tweed- Covered field's coldness Toward our game of enticing it indoors, As if we could erect a rival gate to the departure Whose uniform destination can't surprise, Is blind, speaks not, When on those white and sudden afternoons I take your eyes, and see the sun set twice.