The Gypsy's Window
It seems a stage
backed by imaginations of velvet,
cotton, satin, loops and stripes--

A lovely unconcern
scattered the trivial plates, the rosaries
and centered
a narrownecked dark vase,
unopened yellow and pink
paper roses, a luxury of open red
paper roses--

Watching the trucks go by, from stiff chairs
behind the window show, an old
bandanna'd brutal dignified
woman, a young beautiful woman
her mouth a huge contemptuous rose--

The courage
of natural rhetoric tosses to dusty
Hudson St. the chance of poetry, a chance
poetry gives passion to the roses,
the roses in the gypsy's window in a blue 
vase, look real, as unreal 
as real roses.







Beyond the End

In 'nature' there's no choice--
			          flowers
swing their heads in the wind, sun & moon
       are as they are. But we seem
almost to have it (not just
       available death)

It's energy; a spider's thread; not to
'go on living' but to quicken, to activate: extend:
       Some have it, they force it--
with work or laughter or even
       the act of buying, if that's
all they can lay hands on--

       the girls crowding the stores, where light
colour, solid dreams are--what gay
       desire! It's their festival,
           ring game, wassail, mystery.

It has no grace like that of
the grass, the humble rhythms, the 
falling & rising of leaf and star;
it's barely
a constant. Like salt:
take it or leave it

The 'hewers of wood' & so on; every damn
craftsman has it while he's working
	but it's not
a question of work: some
shine with it, in response. Maybe it is 
response, the will to respond--('reason
can give nothing at all / like
the response to desire') maybe 
a gritting of the teeth, to go 
just that much further, beyond the end
beyond whatever ends: to begin, to be, to defy.







The Innocent

The cat has his sport
and the mouse suffers
but the cat
	is innocent
   having no image of pain in him
	an angel
	dancing with his prey

carries it, frees it, leaps again
with joy upon his darling plaything

	a dance, a prayer!
   How cruel the cat is to our guilty eyes







The Earthwoman and the Waterwoman

	The earthwoman by her oven
	      tends her cakes of good grain.
The waterwoman’s children 
are spindle thin.
		  The earthwoman
	   has oaktree arms. Her children
full of blood and milk
       stamp through the woods shouting.
	  The waterwoman
       sings gay songs in a sad voice
               with her moonshine children.
When the earthwoman
has had her fill of the good day
      she curls to sleep in her warm hut
      a dark fruitcake sleep
but the waterwoman
	   goes dancing in the misty lit-up town
      in dragonfly dresses and blue shoes.







The Rights

I want to give you
something I’ve made

some words on a page--as if 
to say ‘Here are some blue beads’

or, ‘Here’s a bright red leaf I found on
the sidewalk’ (because

to find is to choose, and choice 
is made.	          But it’s difficult:

so far I’ve found
nothing but the wish to give. Or

copies of old words? Cheap
and cruel; also senseless:
                          Take

this instead, perhaps--a half-
promise: If
I ever write a poem of a certain temper
      (willful, tender, evasive,
      sad & rakish)

I’ll give it to you.







The Flight

	‘The will is given us that
	      we may know the 
delights of surrender.’ Blake with 
tense mouth, crouched small (great forehead,
somber eye) amid a crowd’s tallness in a narrow room.
			          The same night
a bird caught in my room, battered
from wall to wall, missing the window over & over
				         (till it gave up and
			      huddled half-dead on a shelf, and I
                                          put up the sash against the cold)

and waking at dawn I again
pushed the window violently down, open
		and the bird gathered itself and flew
		straight out
		quick and calm (over the radiant chimneys--



(Levertov heard the quoted words spoken to her by Blake in a dream, London 1945)







Love Poem

Maybe I’m a ‘sick part of a
sick thing’
	     maybe something
       has caught up with me
certainly there is a 
mist between us
		  I can barely
see you
       but your hands
are two animals that push the 
mist aside and touch me.







A Silence

Among its petals the rose
still holds
	   a few tears of the morning rain that
broke it from its stem
		   In each
shines a speck of
		   red light, darker even
than the rose. Phoenix-tailed
slateblue martins pursue
          one   another, spaced out
in hopeless hope, circling
           the porous clay vase, dark from
the water in it. Silence
surrounds the facts. A language
still unspoken.








Something to Wear

To sit and sit like the cat
and think my thoughts through--
that might be a deep pleasure:


to learn what news
persistence might discover,
and like a woman knitting

make something from the 
skein unwinding, unwinding,
something I could wear

or something you could war
when at length I rose to meet you
outside the quiet sitting-room

(the room of thinking and knitting
the room of cats and women)
among the clamor of 

cars and people,
the stars drumming and poems 
leaping from shattered windows.