It is not your eyes, your face, I remember.

It is not your dancing, race-horse feet.

It is something else I remember you for on the pier mornings.

Your hands are sweeter than nut-brown bread when you touch me.

Your shoulder brushes my arm—a south-west wind crosses the pier.

I forget your hands and your shoulder and I say again:

Nothing else in this song—only your face.

Nothing else here—only your drinking, night-gray eyes.

White Shoulders

Your white shoulders

I remember

And your shrug of laughter

Low laughter

Shaken slow

From your white shoulders.

June

Paula is digging and shaping the loam of a salvia,

Scarlet Chinese talker of summer.

Two petals of crabapple blossom blow fallen in Paula’s hair,

And fluff of white from a cottonwood.

Poppies

She loves blood-red poppies for a garden to walk in.

In a loose white gown she walks

and a new child tugs at cords in her body.

Her head to the west at evening when the dew is creeping,

A shudder of gladness runs in her bones and torsal fiber:

She loves blood-red poppies for a garden to walk in.

Margaret

Many birds and the beating of wings

Make a flinging reckless hum

In the early morning at the rocks

Above the blue pool

Where the gray shadows swim lazy.

In your blue eyes, O reckless child,

I saw today many little wild wishes,

Eager as the great morning.

Baby Toes

There is a blue star, Janet,

Fifteen years’ ride from us,

If we ride a hundred miles an hour.

There is a white star, Janet,

Forty years’ ride from us,

If we ride a hundred miles an hour.

Helga

The wishes on this child’s mouth

Came like snow on marsh cranberries;

The tamarack kept something for her;

The wind is ready to help her shoes.

The north has loved her; she will be

A grandmother feeding geese on frosty

Mornings; she will understand

Early snow on the cranberries

Better and better then.

Spanish

Fasten black eyes on me.

I ask nothing of you under the peach trees,

Fasten your black eyes in my gray

with the spear of a storm.

The air under the peach blossoms is a haze of pink.

You and a Sickle Moon

The lips of you are with me tonight.

And the arms of you are a circle of white.

The dream of it burns.

And I want you and the stars.

I want you and a sickle moon.

The finger tips of you

Five hundred miles away

Make a wireless crying flash:

I know a search that’s useless,

I know a code I don’t hunt for,

I know a face that’s gone.

Back home the hills talk to me.

Here the hills are strangers.

The lips of you are a ghost.

The arms of you are a ghost.

The red and white is empty air.

Omaha 1917

In Blue Gown and in Black Satin Gown

she wore a blue gown for him once

the fabric flowing with her curves