Plaint
My heart, my life, my queen and soaring star,
now hear my prayer, do not it bar,
but grant me mercy for my endless love;
I love you well, my rose, my grace, my dove!
Do not my urgent need then turn away,
but miracle endow to I who pray,
and grant me cheer, and joy, and all good thing,
that I may in your honor rise to sing!
But, ah! most cruel beloved one divine,
though truly you have claimed that you are mine,
yet you deny, deny, deny, my every wish,
as though you were as cold as ocean-fish.
How cruel you are, unyielding in your ways,
and taking joy from all my summer days!
It seems that when I beg, you have but laughed,
and I have then been charged for overdraft.
The dollars in the book seem far too low,
though I have saved and saved, and this you know;
O empty bank account, my sweet, my pet,
refill your empty heart and heal my debt!
Misrememberings
How strange the tricks that memory will play!
You never were so great in living life.
When thought turns toward your face, the care and strife
are softened by the twilight shades to May.
The lies my mind will tell of you today!
Can victims come to love the wounding knife?
My thoughts all run a-riot, folly rife,
until they are made sane by light of day.
Your words were not quite gentle, but they soared;
they sing as I recall them, sad and low.
I know as sweet what then I did not know,
so precious all the things I had ignored,
as if old pain were tied up in a bow
and set in splendor in a treasure-hoard.
On Reading a Particularly Pointless Paper in Analytic Philosophy
I would rather a world
filled with oceans, storms, sights,
or jungles below us
where leopards hunt in the night
and far arctic deserts,
not sand but cold snow,
where the moonlight above
makes a moonlight below.
I would rather strong wine
or whiskey oak-aged
and a torrent of language
in black ink on a page,
filled with light
from sun, moon, and star,
mingling and bright,
whence the reindeer are.
Or baroque desert vistas!
Where wind carves old stone,
as the sun furies down
on dust and bleached bone.
I'd rather a small garden
with a picnicking space
than this cramped little cell
that orders no-place.
Layers and layers in a grain of dust are curled;
yes, but in a mote within a mighty world.
