"Put on, I beg you, charms made of feathers."

                           -- Czeslaw Milosz, "A Magic Mountain"

And then I beg You, take this heart of mine,

give to me, not begging any more,

Your feathery dawns, Your callous forehead,

the wing-sweep of Your mind.  Re-make me

with love's monuments of flowers in worlds

forever meets in the flight of a bird.

Feather me Your spells, pouch me in your bag

of amulets and charms.  Make me one of those

proclaiming: Here I am, working magic

in the words of sun and rain, of trees down

rootward there in Your own chambers of the lost.

First appeared in Little Star 6

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What's Hollowed Out

Mass diversions on the breakneck highway,

those larks of moments left of other pasts,

old loves, old flowers in the garden time

when you were queen and I was on the bridge

you wouldn't cross.  Not I, divine new life,

was going to trip you up with wasted time.

Long  sequesters with those naked slaves: hearts

in disarray at any port that stood

hot shadowed on the road to mad July.

Come in, you darkling wind, we said, come in

and be the breath of us who'll haunt and ride

you so to sleep, where we'll dream of places lost,

where at the windows only black peers in

with eyes more cold (or were they warm?)

than what the crowblack wings of even God

would ever bring again so close and clear.

First appeared in Little Star 6

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