The Well
~ Denise Levertov

At sixteen I believed the moonlight
could change me if it would.
I moved my head
on the pillow, even moved my bed
as the moon slowly
crossed the open lattice.

I wanted beauty, a dangerous
gleam of steel, my body thinner,
my pale face paler.
I moonbathed
diligently, as others sunbathe.
But the moon’s unsmiling stare
kept me awake. Mornings,
I was flushed and cross.

It was on dark nights of deep sleep
that I dreamed the most, sunk in the well,
and woke rested, and if not beautiful,
filled with some other power.

Under a Wild Green Fig Tree
~ Edward Hirsch

I am going to eat seven pomegranate seeds
and lie down under a wild green fig tree
in a field that has been ploughed three times

because I want to sleep in fertile soil
sinking into dream time, dream space,
and slip past the door to the underworld,

which has been left ajar for questers
and adepts, for reckless night revelers
stumbling into the corridor of ghosts,

so I can wander the subterranean realm
and listen to Persephone’s hell songs,
music she could learn only in Hades—

the low, fateful lyrics of death,
the soul’s radical return to innocence,
the earth’s eternal movement and passage,

our deep human labor to become spirits,
our almost vegetal need to be reborn,
the cycle of loss, myth of regeneration.

A couple of years ago, we had our back yard cleared of the overgrown flora so we could replant and xeriscape.

A friend adopted the rose bush (that is, she spent an afternoon digging it up and moving it to her place).

Roots persist. This photo is from today.

Love Sleeps in the Poet’s Chest
~ Federico García Lorca

You’ll never know how I love you
because you sleep in me and are asleep
Weeping I hide you—haunted
by a voice of penetrating steel

Law that shakes the flesh and a star
by now has entered my aching heart
and disturbing words have bitten
the wings of your stern self

People leap in the gardens
looking for your body and my death
on horses of light with green manes

But stay asleep—O my life—
Hear the violins sing my shattered blood
Do you see them watching us?

The Traveling Out
~ Lucile Adler

I wonder, since we are both travelling out,
If we may go together? Thank you.

You may be sure you will be alone
And private as though I were no one.
God knows, I do not wish to increase your burden.
Naturally, these airports, blinding cities,
And foundry lights confuse you, make you
More solitary than the sight of one lost lamp
Across a bare land promising life there—
Someone over that field alone and perhaps
Waiting for you. That used to be the way.

Feel perfectly free to choose how
You will be alone, since we are going together.
Of course, I never move, I merely hold you
In my mind like a prayer. You are my way
Of praying, and I have chosen you out of hordes
Of travellers to speed to silently, on my own.
I will be with you, with your baffled anger
Among fuming cities, with your grief
At having lost dark fields and lamplight.
It is my way of moving, of praying—

Oh, not to give you someone like me,
That’s all over, impossible, I go nowhere;
And besides, nothing is given absolutely
Nothing and no one, only white sermons among
The white of a billion bulbs. No,
Sitting here behind my shutters at twilight,
I am stretching over the blazing lanes,
The dazed crowds jostled and razed
By light, only to join your mind and guide you
Gently, leading you, not, alas, to my own lamp
Across the fields of the world, or to a cozy last
Prayer of lamplight blessing the fields of the air,
But out into hordes of stars that move away
As we move, and for which your travelling
Prepares you to go out a little more boldly,
All alone as I am alone.