Three Poems

    I.
So many loves and passions in the dust:
The city black and swollen, a bad dream
Shaping the night to its own lumps and savours.

Its river-voices will not come to rest,
Nor its tumultuous brew of humours clarify,
Though keys to courts and tenements rust bare.

Tongues run blind far out into these reaches;
Days are laid waste by their trafficking.
The moon rising can tell another story

To Samuel and his nurse, there at the window.
Its metals blend in the ascendant;
The garden fills with smokes of dusty silver.

An elm crosses its shadows on the wall;
The motion of its growth is held, opposed,
A plying web gathers its strength about them.

The two of them share Milton's words with us:
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