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