Desert Air

[rejectomorph]

Warm wind rakes the humming woods and sets the stars twinkling. Doors bump, and the roof-scraping branch groans. Orion leaves the sky early now, eager to catch the sun. The little dipper has tipped on end. When the waning moon rises, the chorus of crickets is still in full song. All trace of winter has vanished from the soft scented air. Yesterday afternoon, I saw butterflies everywhere, and hardly a tree was without its singing birds. In all this exuberance of sound and movement, I alone encounter stillness, I alone engage silence.

Someone Talking to Himself

by Richard Wilbur


Even when first her face,
Younger than any spring,
Older than Pharaoh's grain
And fresh as Phoenix-ashes,
Shadowed under its lashes
Every earthly thing,
There was another place
I saw in a flash of pain:
Off in the fathomless dark
Beyond the verge of love
I saw blind fishes move,
And under a stone shelf
Rode the recusant shark--
Cold, waiting, himself.

Oh, even when we fell,
Clean as a mountain source
And barely able to tell
Such ecstasy from grace,
Into the primal bed
And current of our race,
We knew yet must deny
To what we gathered head:
That music growing harsh,
Trees blotting the sky
Above the roaring course
That in summer's drought
Slowly would peter out
Into a dry marsh.

Love is the greatest mercy,
A volley of the sun
That lashes all with shade,
That the first day be mended;
And yet, so soon undone,
It is the lover's curse
Till time be comprehended
And the flawed heart unmade.
What can I do but move
From folly to defeat,
And call that sorrow sweet
That teaches us to see
The final face of love
In what we cannot be?