Brother, I am fireSurging under the ocean floor.I shall never meet you, brother–Not for years, anyhow;Maybe thousands of years, brother.Then I will warm you,Hold you close, wrap you in circles,Use…

Out of the fireCame a man sunkenTo less than cinders,A tea-cup of ashes or so.And I,The gold in the house,Writhed into a stiff pool.

Cross the hands over the breast here–so.Straighten the legs a little more–so.And call for the wagon to come and take her home.Her mother will cry some and so will her…

THREE walls around the town of Tela when I came.They expected everything of those walls;Nobody in the town came out to kiss my feet. I knocked the walls down, killed…

THIS handful of grass, brown, says little. This quarter mile field of it, waving seeds ripening in the sun, is a lake of luminous firefly lavender.  Prairie roses, two of them,…

I Have loveAnd a child,A banjoAnd shadows.(Losses of God,All will goAnd one dayWe will holdOnly the shadows.)

Come you, cartoonists,          Hang on a strap with me here          At seven o’clock in the morning          On a Halsted street car.                Take your pencils               And draw these faces. Try with your pencils…

Faces of two eternities keep looking at me.One is Omar Khayam and the red stuff     wherein men forget yesterday and to-morrow     and remember only the voices and songs,     the stories,…

I HAVE lived in many half-worlds myself … and so I know you.  I leaned at a deck rail watching a monotonous sea, the same circling birds and the same plunge…

I WALKED among the streets of an old city and the streets were lean as the throats of hard seafish soaked in salt and kept in barrels many years.How old,…