I am going to raise an agonized cry: who spoke to you
The first drops of silence, the slight tips
Of dew upon the grassy stubs
Of green that crowns the hill’s soft
Down-flowing streams? I want
Streams, I want golden sunset
To embrace me and violate me in a soft
Pink-red pulse. Flowing pastels, and nature
Like the whisper of a chest, and like a gripping
Push and ahh. Everything comes together
In real, and words are like violets, spreading out
Over the hill, the little pink-dabbed paint, creation
Out of me, true and incandescent expression
Of a voice very like the wind: the chill wind
That a rabbit feels, upon the burrow, and dives
Into the thick-mossed earth, the thick stumped earth, the earth lined round about
With trees, pulsing out; trees, drinking; trees cupping
The vision of a crystallized globe, a little container
Of dreams:

Criticism is vile. Criticism is black muck. Criticism
Asking all the questions why and how
That drip like tar, or oil, or black nicotine
Flowing in lethe streams; a smoky wind
Blows across the silos and the barren dirt
That arid berth cannot behold in light
Which, scattered, drifts about
Like a hazy mist, a desert mirage:

Light could pore into the ground,
Light could burrow and grow
Into violets, little plucks of pink, blue-
Gold mixed in by painter’s flecks
With dots of red like globes; or growing ripples
Hitting the lake-stormed stream, the wind
That bristles in the willow’s dripping green:
Poetry should speak and be a dream.