This month is called a tender one:
it has proved so to me but not
in me. I have not uttered one folly,
the more for the softness of the season.
In cloudy networks we may all
be netted together by darksome affections.
Disquietful, we lived and lived
strange moonscenes, a consider-the-lilies attitude.
Bubble-blowing Caprice with a weathervane
on her helmet, unless I see her life
branching into mine, she gives me no
ancestral help, elegant curve of fear and faith
whose arrangements of eggshells
had the ghosts of poems in them,
knowing to call back, to listen to
electric speech when the call is lost.
As Mary’s veil was said to become
luminous during night vigils, I love
internal greenness, rusty back ferns,
petals backed with pale violet.
You are asking a woman of a great
many words to recall half a dozen.
You expect me to believe you now,
I believed you then.
Me and my rhetoric should be some
where, inside my head my own
voice without any connection
to my mouth, in the feminized tea shop,
in the humming room. I saw nothing
in the hands of the man who fell.
They saw a rare and previously
protected thing, Mr Whoever Turns Up.