Through the wings of dead things and living things....

If I lift my hand? If I write to you? The letters

Can be stored in a box. Can they constitute the shape

Of a love? Can the paper be ground? Can the box

Be altar and garden plot and bed? Can there rise

From the bed the form of a two-headed creature,

A figure that looks both forward and back, keeping

Watch always, one head sleeping while the other wakes,

The bird head sleeping while the lion head wakes,

And then the changing of the guard?....No,

The flies do not trouble me. They are like the stars

At night. Common and beautiful. They are like

My thoughts. I stood at midnight in the orchard.

There were so many stars, and yet the stars,

The very blackness of the night, though perfectly

Cold and clear, seemed to me to be insubstantial,

The whole veil of things seemed less substantial

Than the thing that moved in the dark behind me,

An unseen bird or beast, something shifting in its sleep,

Half-singing and then forgetting it was singing:

Be thou always ravished by love, starlight running

Down and pulling back the veil of the heart,

And then the water that does not exist opening up

Before one, dark as wine, and the unveiled figure

Of the self stepping unclothed, sweetly stripped

Of its leaf, into starlight and the shadow of night,

The cold water warm around the narrow ankles,

The body at its most weightless, a thing so durable

It will—like the carved stone figures holding up

The temple roof—stand and remember its gods

Long after those gods have been forsaken.

Lion