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I RADIANT notes | |
| Piercing my narrow-chested room, | |
| Beating down through my ceiling— | |
| Smeared with unshapen | |
| Belly-prints of dreams | 5 |
| Drifted out of old smokes— | |
| Trillions of icily | |
| Peltering notes | |
| Out of just one canary; | |
| All grown to song, | 10 |
| As a plant to its stalk, | |
| From too long craning at a sky-light | |
| And a square of second-hand blue. | |
| |
| Silvery-strident throat | |
| So assiduously serenading me, | 15 |
| My brain flinches under | |
| The glittering hail of your notes. | |
| Were you not safe behind—rats know what thickness of—plastered wall, | |
| I might fathom | |
| Your golden delirium | 20 |
| With throttle of finger and thumb, | |
| Shutting valve of bright song. | |
| |
II But if—away off—on a fork of grassed earth | |
| Socketing an inlet of blue water … | |
| If canaries—do they sing out of cages?— | 25 |
| Flung such luminous notes, | |
| They would sink in the spirit, | |
| Lie germinal … | |
| Housed in the soul as a seed in the earth, | |
| To break forth at spring with the crocuses | 30 |
| into young smiles on the mouth … | |
| Or, glancing off buoyantly, | |
| Radiate notes in one key | |
| With the sparkle of rain-drops | |
| On the petal of a cactus flower | 35 |
| Focusing the just-out sun. | |
| |
| Cactus … why cactus? | |
| God … God! | |
| Somewhere … away off … | |
| Cactus flowers, star-yellow, | 40 |
| Ray out of spiked green; | |
| And empties of sky | |
| Roll you over and over | |
| Like a mother her baby in long grass. | |
| And only the wind scandal-mongers with gum trees, | 45 |
| Pricking multiple leaves at his wondrous story. | |
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