It's called "Wormwood."
And the title and the mood of the poems
comes from a quotation which you may remember
from the Book of the Apocalypse about the great star called
Wormwood.
"It fell from heaven, burning as it were a torch
and it fell on the third part of the waters and the rivers.
And the name of the star is called Wormwood.
And the third part of the waters became Wormwood,
and many men died of the waters because they were made bitter."
It seems to me that a person of any sensitivity
spends a great deal of his or her life balancing
an acceptance and a rejection of life.
And these poems come from a period in my own life
when emotional denial came to dominate
and when the positive openness and energy and hope
were reduced to the mere vestige,
a kind of brutish stubbornness in the face of the storm.
But one tends to survive and I repeat,
it is one part of the waters that were turned to Wormwood.
This is a sequence of love poems under stress.
As I'm going to read it now it begins with the poem
itself called "Wormwood."
"I have dreamed it again standing suddenly
still in a ticket among wet trees
stunned minutely shuddering hearing a wooden echo escape.
A mossy floor almost colorless disappears in depths of rain
among the tree shapes.
I am straining tasting that echo a second longer.
If I can hold it, familiar if I can hold it.
A black tree with a double trunk, two trees grown into one
throws up its blurred branches.
The two trunks in their infinitesimal dance of growth
have turned completely about one another.
They join the slowly twisted scar that I recognize.
A quick arc flashes sideways in the air,
a heavy blade in flight, a wooden stroke, iron sinks,
and the gasping core.
I will dream it again."