THE BRONZE GIRL
 

Emperor and dancing girl
lie in the cracked heat;
the sun ignores his knuckles,
the dust is on her anklets.
Ash, dew, and cricket song.

Singing and the chariot dance
to brisk hands by the fire:
Once cornfield and ballad
and harvest in the heart.
Till the star-stricken Aryans.

Ah, a bittersweet geometry
in the peeling moonlight:
Open bathhouses and
a harvest of sand.
Lizard home and beetle home.

Apple-bent, the sun catches
voices like drums clear:
Look here, Kunitz,
a bronze girl. Then silence.
Where the living are dead.
 

THE POET
 

For all his wild hair like an aureole,
Stammer at parties, slipping from a tram,
Putting off the mending of a sole,
And putting on a mock-heroic Damn!,
He notices the spider's intestines
Claim harlot, smuggler and blackmarketeer,
And in the clicking grin his eye divines
A moody world of artifice and fear.

Above all, this: When a woman turns
Black clouds of hair, with a rhythmic hand
Weaving their silk in the possessive sun,
He sees her common eyes stretch to a land
O lost, lost; as when repentance yearns
For hope,and love, and finds that there is none.