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Prophecy on Lethe
Echo, the beating of the tide,
Infringes on the blond curved shore;
Archaic weeds from sleep's green side
Bind skull and pelvis till the four
Seasons of the blood are unified.
Anonymous sweet carrion,
Blind mammal floating on the stream
Of depthless sound, completely one
In the cinnamon-dark of no dream :-
A pod of silence, bursting when the sun
Clings to the forehead, will surprise
The gasping turtle and the leech
With your strange brain blooming as it lies
Stanley F. Kunitz
Abandoned to the bipeds on the beach;
Your jelly-mouth and, crushed, your polyp eyes.
POEM
O Heart: this is a dream I had, or not a dream.
Lovingly, lovingly, I wept, but my tears did not rhyme.
In the year of my mother's blood, when I was born,
She buried my innocent head in a field, because the earth
Was sleepy with the winter. And I spoke the corn,
And I cried the clover up, with the dewy mouth of my
mirth.
In the honey of summer my brain conceived: a child, I
flowered
Over the maiden-stalks, drinking sweet upper light,
For I was intimate with the sun, till he devoured
Me utterly, O Heart, his tenderest neophyte.
So I died. Small gluttonous birds picked on my limpid
brow,
My pale drooped feet were manacled with rushing worms;
And when I was sufficiently dead (torturer thou!)
I was born again. Dissolving, memory reforms
The cyclic hour I pulled life's bony root, slow inch
By inch, from its loamy trap; shrilly, like a mandrake,
screamed