All things rigid will flow.
The clenching cords in your stomach will unknot.
One by one your tendons will relent
and ripe grain like water
will run through your polished fingers.

Lightening the east, spraying the trees hazy,
spring in the South comes fabled and soft,
reaching over the bed, hanging green in the windowframe.
Spiders dance its rhythms on a hieroglyphic ceiling.

Your unwilling tongue will sing it, too;
your body will thrust from its bed,
tantalized by the bursting ground,
the vows of the dry earth
yearly forgotten and forsworn
and rasping your marrow with their fatal hope.

A sparrow, with scant hesitation,
lifts, and evaporates over the streaked roof’s tilt.

Your life, long wooed, will release you.
Your death will drive your hands.
Seeds of the wild grass will be sown in the valleys,
and all things rigid will flow.

March 16, 1973

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