Only Skin      And there was a booming above you   That night, black airplanes flew over the sea   And they were lowing and shifting like   Beached whales   Shelled snails   As you strained and you squinted to see   The retreat of their hairless and blind cavalry      You froze in your sand shoal   Prayed for your poor soul   Sky was a bread roll, soaking in a milk-bowl   And when the bread broke, fell in bricks of wet smoke   My sleeping heart woke, and my waking heart spoke      And there was a silence you took to mean something:   Run, sing   For alive you will evermore be   And the plague of the greasy black engines a-skulkin'   Has gone east   While you're left to explain them to me   Released from their hairless and blind cavalry      With your hands in your pockets, stubbily running   To where I'm unfresh, undressed and yawning   Well, what is this craziness? This crazy talking?   You caught some small death when you were sleepwalking      It was a dark dream, darlin', it's over   The firebreather is beneath the clover   Beneath his breathing there is cold clay, forever   A toothless hound-dog choking on a feather      But I took my fishingpole (fearing your fever)   Down to the swimminghole, where there grows bitter herb   That blooms but one day a year by the riverside - i'd bring it here:   Apply it gently   To the love you've lent me      While the river was twisting and braiding, the bait bobbed   And the string sobbed, as it cut through the hustling breeze   And I watched how the water was kneading so neatly   Gone treacly   Nearly slowed to a stop in this heat   - in a frenzy coiling flush along the muscles beneath      Press on me: we are restless things   Webs of seaweed are swaddling   And you call upon the dusk   Of the musk of a squid   Shot full of ink, until you sink into your crib      Rowing along, among the reeds, among the rushes   I heard your song, before my heart had time to hush it!   Smell of a stone fruit being cut and being opened   Smell of a low and of a lazy cinder smoking      And when the fire moves away   Fire moves away, son   Why would you say   I was the last one?      Scrape your knee; it is only skin   Makes the sound of violins   And when I cut your hair, and leave the birds all of the trimmings   I am the happiest woman among all women      And the shallow   Water   Stretches as far as I can see   Knee-deep, trudging along   The seagull weeps; "so long"      I'm humming a threshing song   Until the night is over   Hold on!   Hold on!   Hold your horses back from the fickle dawn      I have got some business out at the edge of town   Candy weighing both of my pockets down   'Til I can hardly stay afloat, from the weight of them   (and knowing how the common-folk condemn   What it is I do, to you, to keep you warm   Being a woman, being a woman)      But always up the mountainside you're clambering   Groping blindly, hungry for anything:   Picking through your pocket linings - well, what is this?   Scrap of sassafras, eh sisyphus?      I see the blossoms broke and wet after the rain   Little sister, he will be back again   I have washed a thousand spiders down the drain   Spiders ghosts hang soaked and dangelin'   Silently from all the blooming cherry trees   In tiny nooses, safe from everyone   - nothing but a nuisance; gone now, dead and done   Be a woman, be a woman!      Though we felt the spray of the waves   We decided to stay till the tide rose too far   We weren't afraid, cause we know what you are   And you know that we know what you are      Awful atoll   O, incalculable indiscreetness and sorrow!   Bawl, bellow:   Sibyl sea-cow, all done up in a bow      Toddle and roll;   Teeth an impalpable bit of leather   While yarrow, heather and hollyhock   Awkwardly molt along the shore      Are you mine?   My heart?   Mine anymore?      Stay with me for awhile   That's an awfully real gun   I know life will lay you down   As the lightning has lately done      Failing this, failing this,   Follow me, my sweetest friend   To see what you anointed in pointing your gun there      Lay it down! Nice and slow!   There is nowhere to go, save up   Up where the light, undiluted, is weaving in a drunk dream   At the sight of my baby, out back:   Back on the patio watching the bats bring night in   - while, elsewhere, estuaries of wax-white   Wend, endlessly, towards seashores unmapped      Last week our picture window produced a half-word   Heavy and hollow, hit by a brown bird   We stood and watched her gape like a rattlesnake   And pant and labour over every intake      I said a sort of prayer for some sort of rare grace   Then thought I ought to take her to a higher place   Said: "dog nor vulture nor cat shall toy with you   And though you die, bird, you will have a fine view"      Then in my hot hand   She slumped her sick weight   We tramped through the poison oak   Heartbroke and inchoate      The dogs were snapping   And you cuffed their collars   While I climbed the tree-house   Then how I hollered!   Well she'd lain, as still as a stone, in my palm, for a lifetime or two      Then, saw the treetops, cocked her head and up and flew   (while, back in the world that moves, often   According to the hoarding of these clues   Dogs still run roughly around   Little tufts of finch-down)      And the cities we passed were a flickering wasteland   But his hand in my hand made them hale and harmless   While down in the lowlands the crops are all coming;   We have everything   Life is thundering blissful towards death   In a stampede of his fumbling green gentleness      You stopped by, I was all alive   In my doorway, we shucked and jived   And when you wept, I was gone:   See, I got gone when I got wise   But I can't with certainty say we survived      Then down, and down   And down, and down   And down, and deeper   Stoke without sound   The blameless flames   You endless sleeper      Through fire below, and fire above, and fire within   Sleeped through the things that couldn't have been if you hadn't have been      And when the fire moves away   Fire moves away, son   And why would you say   I was the last one?      All my bones they are gone, gone, gone   Take my bones, I don't need none   Cold, cold cupboard, lord, nothing to chew on!   Suck all day on a cherry stone      Dig a little hole, not three inches round   Spit your pit in a hole in the ground   Weep upon the spot for the starving of me!   Till up grow a fine young cherry tree      Well when the bough breaks, what'll you make for me?   A little willow cabin to rest on your knee   What'll I do with a trinket such as this?   Think of your woman, who's gone to the west      But I'm starving and freezing in my measly old bed!   Then i'll crawl across the salt flats to stroke your sweet head   Come across the desert with no shoes on!   I love you truly, or I love no-one      Fire   Moves   Away      Fire moves away, son   Why would you say   That I was the last one?   Last one      Clear the room! There's a fire, a fire, a fire   Get going, and I'm going to be right behind you   And if the love of a woman or two, dear,   Couldn't move you to such heights, then all I can do   Is do, my darling, right by you