The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill;

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.

A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.

We say God and the imagination are one . . . How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

From oriole to crow, note the decline In music. Crow is realist. But, then, Oriole, also, may be realist.