The Cold Green Element, 1955

At the end of the garden walkthe wind and its satellite wait for me;their meaning I will not knowuntil I go there,but the black-hatted undertaker

who, passing, saw my heart beating in the grass,is also going there. Hi, I tell him,a great squall in the Pacific blew a dead poetout of the water,

Crowds depart daily to see it, and returnwith grimaces and incomprehension;if its limbs twitched in the airthey would sit at its feetpeeling their oranges.

And turning over I embrace like a loverthe trunk of a tree, one of thosefor whom the lightning was too muchand grew a brillanthunchback with a crown of leaves.

The ailments escaped from the labelsof medicine bottles and all fled to the wind;I’ve seen myself lately in the eyesof old women,spent streams mourning my manhood,

in whose old pupils the sun becamea bloodsmear on broad catalpa leavesand hanging from ancient twigs,my murdered selvessparked the air like muted collisions

of fruit. A black dog howls down my blood,a black dog with yellow eyes;he too by someone’s inadvertencesaw the bloodsmearon the broad catalpa leaves.

But the furies clear a path for me to the wormwho sang for an hour in the throat of a robin,and misled by the cries of young boysI am againa breathless swimmer in that cold green element.