Four Early Berkeley Poems

Narcissus Scorned Go, love, Choose some more classic passion For the harrowed heart. Your hysterics, Mere test by tears, Still flow with bitterness, Freshly bitten. Search out some mild indifference, An aesthetic rule of regulated sense. Be numbed! There is more true tenderness In mirrored forms fixees Than dithyrambic lays. Assault again this sulking heart, Having returned in subtler fashion... But calmly. Caravan these desert sands wind blown expand. designs have grown from fig seeds sown among the reeds an oasis breeds. our wandering races have forgotten faces, wind-begotten, ripe and rotten. dry winds have rent twelve nomads’ tent. twelve ancients clad in shadows had watched spectrum close while four winds rose. twelve colors blend, each strand worn thin inscribes the morning pageant born. red snowflakes bake on the parched lake where camels marched, their pink tongues arched; now limply hung, they cower, sung of distant towers, one blue pale flower beneath that veil, we forsake and fail. TREE WEEPS IN TEXAS CROWD PAYS FOR TEARS what wonder you cry? sap runs dry after forty years sweating august heat. let them meet beneath languishing limbs, limp seeking shade, they will pray you, “bless us”. you, dying, may fade drowned with hymns, filtering tears they drink in Texas. song clouds ripple beneath us, blue cast sky washing. we are angels bathing, watch fire spread on shores. night quenched, moon-dipped, dry the sands shifting. bright sphere floaters sing we, home she sifts.