I.
The poem of the earth is never still,
But it annoys the mind with its monogamy:
The grasses’ ratchets rasping, in their own beds every night,
Lovers in a crowd, chirruping words of love.

The poem of the mind is never still,
But it fixes the earth with its steady gaze,
And returning with the radiant earth, gazes at itself,
And in this exponential brightness, gazes at its voice.

Who wrote or hears them, if they never rest,
Delighting in the loud immensity,
Or mirrors, ever wider, gazing at each other?

Coming back from school one day, I surprised them.
It was the lovely pythoness reclining
With the skinny giant in the sleepy dirt.

II. Respect

Look for yourself. Eyes from the underbrush
Blink at the shimmering early spring meadow.
The whole forest chorus in a thousand gleaming puddles shouts,
“Sly fox, come on out! We see you better than you see us.”

Or, when Mesmer holds his mirrors to the well-deep eyes of demoiselles
In darkened velveteen saloons, like sunlight in a placid pond
The images of trees and clouds, the mirror’s face does not dissolve
Or fade – though eyes, waters in a well, go bad.

Now you may say, whatever has eyes can see,
But only we shrink with anxious fear
Until we have blindness in sight.

But as for myself, I say: whoever made man made right,
Not as tall as a tree, or as small as a bee,
And wherever he gazes, gazes face back.

III. On reading Stevens in Bocskai út

A golden man with a silver hat in a golden boat on a golden stream,
Angling in the fluent gold. Overhead the sycamores
Folious with gold. Underneath suspicious sturgeon
Eyes the fly, but only sees a rainbow of intensities.

From my window, overhead, the city’s moon clicks signal red.
A multitude of anxious sleepers slip into their rumbling dreams.
Gold rococo portals rattle – lovers in the vestibule.
Something haunts the crowd. A woman haunts me, too.

The book says rest and roll, control your days,
Sit back among the affable waves of meditation
Lapping at the streets. For the days you’ll have with you
Always, like the poor, like the cunning streams,
And the circuits of your heavy dreams, honey on the coals,
The hues you wish to see, your rainbows of anxiety.

IV. Lytle Street (for Peggy Enrich)

Wait! There’s still some lesson
To be gained by looking out,
Watching the last gratuitous fit
Of those Norway spruces before they are
Utterly swallowed up by snow –
So I watch myself on watch,
Up to my knees, freezing till dawn,
The life of a white field.

A few cars on the street. I won’t exclude them,
Asleep in their leveling weight.
A light from a kitchen: honey in the snow.
Down the street latecomers burst into view.
These then are the stars of the earth,
The steadfast, the significant ones.

So let the images snow, the verbs and stars,
Let concepts carouse and come down!
I live and breathe in that lightweight world
Which even in this morning stillness
Is festive like atoms in the void,
Persuasive as Ulysses’ words.

But… how can I explain? I’m covered with snow.
Great Demiurge! Buried by air!
While you, still glowing with coffee and sleep,
Consider the eyes you must face today.
Nothing is rich on the human earth
But the stars who see day by day.