My Soul Is Not Only a Dark Inland Sea

My soul is not only a dark inland sea

A night-center's impenetrable depth

It is the single breath ordered by time

Star fields and hourglass roses

Naked beneath the flesh.

The thought in a dream

Behind monotone sorrows

The reality that transcends multiplicity

The struggles of tomorrow

Under a hardened snow.

A soul of granite so serrated and tight

I cannot appropriate

It is the moon's coming

My bones bleached in starlight

Scenes shifting with sinuous clarity.

Undulating pastures of chicory and white clover

Days damp deep in beauty and morning glory

Pale green meadows

Odd days after the rain

The nothingness that longs to be.

But in the end what do I know?

For I am one and alone

What mirror can fit

A cloud before the sun's deaf moon?

Come now, inhabit my eyes-

Show what I forget to see

Between stone and air

Beneath the drape of red evenings

That tell me I am not my own property

But the rolling canna of rich twilights.

The drops of rain into which I sink

With a bubbling groan

The long nights with damp shoes

Which have no cause can be known

To prove yourself in me.