Consistent with the Thought of the Aforesaid

Consistent with the thought of the aforesaid,
I entered the office and tendered my resignation
The lion girl in brown smiled her volcano teeth at me
And the city outside melted into placid aluminum,
And the subways rattled great as worms
Devouring tunnels
And happily we lived within their bellies.

The sea spread its spray of silver flowers to me
And again I was reborn,
This time into an Egyptian family,
As I was working the great, heavy machinery
I disappeared into the green-skinned river
And found myself wearing embroidered clothes
Of thick purple, gold and scarlet, silver,
At the mouth of the Rio Grande,
The sun pierced the roofs of my eyes,

I brought back a boat, a southern fruit,
A fleeting glance of the marmoset,
The few stars harvested in north sea nets,
The voice of a frog lonely for its love,
A man-made lake, a handkerchief with a smudged monogram,
A piercing seed, a handful of steel-gray wheat stalks
With fat, gay kernels,
The hidden echo of the trace of a dance,
Which survived only in the constant wind
Across the mountain-top garden
Inhabited by no one
But the promise of our invisible selves.

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“I Will Surely Hide Myself”

“I will surely hide myself from myself”
And the universe bubble sank into perplexity
And the houses on the hill
And the motionless trucks on the dirt road
And the radio towers and electric poles
Stood still in their dumb contentment
Beneath a bleached sky.

Open the pomegranate of your mouth
And let me count your pomegranate teeth,
Your red pomegranate-juice eyes flash
As you flash the staff of Moses
Upon a promontory whose wind
Blows with an unceasing strength
The ether of a hidden mind.

The Old Car Crawled

The old car crawled along the dusty gutted road,
Its tires threw high clouds that billowed like smoking eyes,
Into the high blue of unceasing wordless mornings.
And along the rocks, the reptiles

Sunned themselves. And the moon
Shone pale in the bleached dawn sky
(It had hung in the night like a rocking ship
Whose passengers dreamed in her hold of the eyes

Of wheeling chariots, and were lulled
To sleep against the heavy weight
Of the abject morning to come)—the car wheels
Spit sand past the rocky well where girls in braided

Hair drew forth cold water, past
The pulsing scratches of a hopeful cricket,
Beating his echoes blindly, listening
For the hidden thicket shadows to answer him in kind.