After honeymooning in China.

Oh lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast;
Oh press it close to thine again,
Where it will break at last! 

-Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Indian Serenade



The neighbors have come back.

Early
this morning while we slept.

Their porch is decorated with prayer flags,

And the swing has been creaking in the
Dewstilling.  Heavy with rolled blood--colored
Rugs, tied in new gold twine.

One walks expectedly along a path where the ground has
been overobscured with our grass, but falls short
of the blacktop.

It has been years since I laid eyes on it, but
somewhere there is a photograph of the Yangtze I used
to bookmark a collection of poems

By Percy Shelley.  The bronze water pitted
an hour, moving to a stylus point,  collaring

One lavender forest into shoulders.

They are coarsely stretched, as if across chimneystone,

Or a bruised knee.

I will lay everything aside for you--

If you are a cushion or tough.

Look at love in the harshest spines.

You know.

Maybe my hair will fall comfortably.

The lure eyes, and go there, again.

Idly come here, ashore,

And go there, again--


Like moss, grown in a furtive arch of landing
Where sunlight can kill
Nothing.

The moon meets a calf.

Nothing can cup my slipping heel but me.
Sentences are cultivated in action,

And mine can be spoken by none but me.

The moon meets a calf in the owing purple
By the light.

And I hear its' caustic chorus.  Nothing--however
The message,

Could behave as I do when I am liberated.