Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly -----

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

Clocks cry : stillness is a lie, my dear ;
The wheels revolve, the universe keeps running.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)

The asteroids turn traitor in the air,
And planets plot with old elliptic cunning;
Clocks cry : stillness is a lie, my dear.

Red the unraveled rose sings in your hair :
Blood springs eternal if the heart be burning.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)

Cryptic stars wind up the atmosphere,
In solar schemes the tilted suns go turning;
Clocks cry : stillness is a lie, my dear.

Loud the immortal nightingales declare :
Love flames forever if the flesh be yearning.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)

Circling zodiac compels the year.
Intolerant beauty never will be learning.
Clocks cry : stillness is a lie, my dear.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)

Among orange-tile rooftops
and chimney pots
the fen fog slips,
gray as rats,

while on spotted branch
of the sycamore
two black rooks hunch
and darkly glare,

watching for night,
with absinthe eye
cocked on the lone, late,
passer-by.

All day she plays at chess with the bones of the world:
Favored (while suddenly the rains begin
Beyond the window) she lies on cushions curled
And nibbles an occasional bonbon of sin.

Prim, pink-breasted, feminine, she nurses
Chocolate fancies in rose-papered rooms
Where polished highboys whisper creaking curses
And hothouse roses shed immoral blooms.

The garnets on her fingers twinkle quick
And blood reflects across the manuscript;
She muses on the odor, sweet and sick,
Of festering gardenias in a crypt,

And lost in subtle metaphor, retreats
From gray child faces crying on the streets.

Better that every fiber crack
and fury make head,
blood drenching vivid
couch, carpet, floor
and the snake-figured almanac
vouching you are
a million green counties from here,

than to sit mute, twitching so
under prickling stars,
with stare, with curse
blackening the time
goodbyes were said, trains let go,
and I, great magnanimous fool, thus wrenched from
my one kingdom.

For they have built the walls of their citadels of steel, and their temples of rock, and they swell within. Also have they lit the dark with colored neons, and the streets are lanced with shooting stars... Vain flash the proud lights in the city of man, red, blue, green, yellow and white. Color of apple, color of grape, of pear, of corn. Clear flash the proud lights, lord, and your far wheeling beacons pale, those far fixed stars, and the planets withered, shrunken, twirl in their forgotten orbits, pale, lord, in the light-bleached sky. In the white cold glare from the city of man.... Vain sound the proud horns in the city of man, sax, trombone, jazz, blues. Color of love, color of mourning, color of hot, color of crying. And all your noisy rains and thunders can not quench his inwardness. Down bands the window where rain rattles in, and in the steamy haze within, loudly brazen the bands begin.

Early in the morning, when the sun is still cool, and the breeze is wet and salt-fresh from the sea, the native women, dressed in black, with black stockings, go to the open market in the center of town with their wicker baskets to bargain and buy fresh fruit and vegetables at the stalls: yellow plums, green peppers, large ripe tomatoes, wreathes of garlic, bunches of yellow and green bananas, potatoes, green beans, squashes and melons. Gaudy striped beach towels, aprons and rope sneakers are hung up for sale against the white adobe pueblos. Within the dark cavern of the stores are great jugs of wine, oil and vinegar in woven straw casings.

Now this is all, and you must know it. But you must also let me know by some means that you know it. If you are not too scrupulous and why, now, are you? You might write me a letter and tell me honestly, why, if you do not fear my childish pleadings, which are far far away and dead after today, why you refuse to let me make a few days of spring with you in Paris? I am coming, and I feel it is somehow now honestly superfluous and much too abstract and stringent of you to pretend there is left any important reason why you do not wish to see me. I know if I were coming in a chaos, a turmoil of accusations, or even making it harder to leave you again (which it may well be, but it is possible to manage this) - - - I know then that you would have a right to forbid. But all I want is to see you, be with you, walk, talk, in a way which I imagine people past the age of love could do (although I am not pretending I would not passionately want to be with you) but we have come into the time and understanding where we could be most kind and good to each other. Even if those eternal years are upon us, why do you now refuse to see me?

One relies so on single symbols which supposedly presage large assumptions. he goes to ballets, ergo he must be sensitive & artistic. he quotes poetry, ergo he must be a kindred spirit. he reads joyce, ergo he must be a genius. let's face it, I am in danger of wanting my personal absolute to be a demigod man, and as there aren't many around, I often unconsciously manufacture my own. and then, I retreat and revel in poetry and literature where the reward value is tangible and accepted. I really do not think deeply. really deeply. I want a romantic nonexistant hero.

Dear Doctor: I am feeling very sick. I have a heart in my stomach which throbs and mocks. Suddenly the simple rituals of the day balk like a stubborn houre. It gets impossible to look people in the eye: corruption may break out again? Who knows. Small talk becomes desperate. Hostility grows, too. That dangerous, deadly venom which comes from a sick heart. Sick min, too. The image of identity we must daily right to impress on the neutral, or hostile, world, collapses inward; we feel crushed.

I am not simply telling you this because I want to be noble; I very much DIDN'T want to be noble. That most intimate immediate woman (which makes me, ironically, so much yours) tormented me into delusion: that I could ever free myself from you. Really, how ridiculous it was... When even you, and even what gods there are, can not free me...?

I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer to NOT feel, NOT to let the world touch one.

Three years ago, the hot sticky August rain fell big and wet as I sat listlessly on my porch at home, crying over the way summer would not come again - never the same. The first story in print came from that "never again" refrain beat out by the rain. August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

Today: clear, flung, blue, pine-chills, orange needles underfoot. Writing weather, after three days of murking clouds, rain-silver tinselly rain, all theatrical and limpid big drops on Monday, then the deluge, cold, straight, and quite magnificent. We sat out on the dripping porch in chairs, rain pooling the green plastic seat covers, smearing the screen with translucent panes of water, seeping into the dry fissured ground.

I could see it, if you thought your being with me would bind me to you more, or give me less freedom to find someone else, but knowing now, as I do and you must, that I am so far bled white that no mere abstinance of knives can cure me, why do you forbid our making the small, limited world we have. Why so tabu? I ask you to ask yourself this. And if you have the courage or understanding in you, to tell me.

I must be lean and write and make worlds beside this to live in.

It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no further.

I feel now as if I were building a very delicate intricate bridge quietly in the night, across the dark from one grave to another while the giant is sleeping. Help me build this o so exquisite bridge.

I need Plot: people growing: banging into each other & into circumstances: stewpot citizens: growing & hurting & loving & making the best of various bad jobs.

A sickness, frenzy of resentment at everything, but myself at the bottom. I lie wakeful at night, wake exhausted with that sense of razor-shaved nerves. I must be my own doctor. I must cure this very destructive paralysis & ruinous brooding & daydreaming.

I suppose I'll always be over-vulnerable, slightly paranoid. But I'm also so damn healthy & resilient. And apple-pie happy. Only I've got to write. I feel sick, this week, of having written nothing lately.

What to do with anger, ask her. One thing to say: Yes, I want the world's praise, money & love, and am furious with anyone, especially with anyone I know or has had a similar experience, getting ahead of me. Well, what to do when this surges up over & over? ...

Nothing bitterness in self, so she finds nothing of sweetness in outside world. Vicious Cycle.

vivid presence rules despotic over pale shadows of past & future.

Feathery-gray French towns gave way to clusters of blinding white pueblos; small green fields fanned out into hot yellow plains of rye. Over-head, the noon sky blazed blue-white, and against the flat stretches of grain moved the dark figures of tanned workers in sombreros and their donkeys.

I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.

... this is what I was meant to make for a man, and to give him this colossal reservoir of faith and love for him to swim in daily...

I can take even the harder horror of letting myself melt into feeling again, and knowing it must freeze again, if only I can believe it is making a minute part of time and space better than it would have been by stubbornly staying always apart when we have so little time to be near.

I am stymied, stuck, at a stasis. Some paralysis of the head has got me frozen... As if I can escape by going numb and daring to begin nothing. Everything seems held up, what is it? ...