1

 
The poem is a shadow or a shade.
A shade of branches from a little tree
shaken quietly by wind.  Today
I followed bleak, anemic streets (subdued

 
by poverty) in search of a black ribbon
for my obsolete Sears Constellation -
my mind's trail, parallel, pale green,
shadowing that dreary road again

 
through February snow, toward... some
vanishing point?  Deep space, black hole?
Or cozy beginning-end (domestic, providential)?
Only a rustling (where an almond flowered).

 
2

 
In my green constellation, the stars shine
like grains of salt at the bottom of the sea.
And I follow a ribbon of shade, a salt-ray
pointed where time and absence merge (in pain).

 
There, pure dark green of clustered fronds
gathers at the root.  From winter salt
one heavy blossom bears unlikely fruit;
one gold florin breaks its rusted bonds.

 
3

 
In the beginning of beginnings and
at the end of ends, he rested, convalescent,
like an infant swaddled in a cerement.
In between seemed so much infinite sand.

 
How to go on, beneath sulfuric stars,
unfriendly distances?  Soon a swift hypothesis
approaches, like whirling mist: there is
a sort of oval armature for vagrant fires.

 
A glass no book can grasp.  No scripture traps
this motley evolution (some dead diagram
adrift from a hollow tree of diagrams
cannot impress itself on flooding sap).

 
Came to the sailor before he circled home
like reasoning of relentless seasons, or
the ineluctible tide - what seemed before
mere mirror-mirage was flashing oasis-kingdom.

 
Beneath the shade of a leaning palm
he drank deep from that muttering pool.
Gazed up through an endless light-filled well.
Wind played in the dust; the pool was calm.