To Build My Shadow a Fire Books by David Wevill

Penguin Modern Poets 4 (with David Holbrook and Christopher Middleton) (1963)

Birth of a Shark (1964)

A Christ of the Ice-Floes (1966)

Penguin Modern European Poets: Sándor Weöres and Ferenc Juhász (1970)

Firebreak (1971)

Where the Arrow Falls (1974)

Casual Ties (1983)

Other Names for the Heart: New and Selected Poems 1964–1984 (1985)

Figure of Eight: New Poems and Selected Translations (1987)

Figure of Eight (1988)

Child Eating Snow (1994)

Solo With Grazing Deer (2001)

Departures: Selected Poems (2003)

Asterisks (2007) TO BUILD MY SHADOW A FIRE The Poetry and Translations of David Wevill

Edited by Michael McGriff

Truman State University Press New Odyssey Series Published by Truman State University Press, Kirksville, Missouri USA tsup.truman.edu © 2010 Truman State University Press New Odyssey Series All rights reserved

Cover image: “Bizarre Tree in Front of Sand Dune,” Mlenny Photography, with permission of iStockphoto.

Cover design: Teresa Wheeler Type: Arno Pro © Adobe Systems Inc.; Galahad © Adobe Systems Inc. Printed by: Edwards Brothers Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan USA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wevill, David, 1935– To build my shadow a fire : the poetry and translations of David Wevill / David Wevill; selected, edited, and with an introduction by Michael McGriff. p. cm. — (New Odyssey series) Includes index. ISBN 978-1-935503-04-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Canadian poetry—20th century. I. McGriff, Michael, 1976– II. Title. PR9199.3.W4257T6 2010 811'.54—dc22 2010004300

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any format by any means without written permission from the publisher.

The paper in this publication meets or exceeds the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materi- als, ANSI Z39.48–1992. For Mike and Britta, who lit the fire and kept it going. I’m carried in my shadow like a violin in its black case. —Tomas Tranströmer Contents

Author’s Preface | xiv Editor’s Preface | xv Acknowledgments | xvii Introduction | xix

A n Note o Fernando Pessoa, San Juan de la Cruz, and Alberto de Lacerda | 253

San Juan de la Cruz The Dark Night | 258

About the Editor | 266 Index of Titles | 267 Index of First Lines | 269 Author’s Preface

It is difficult to preface a book that covers so much of one’s lifetime. The poems and other work in this selection represent some forty-five years, during which there have been many life-changes, changes of circumstance and place, especially my move from England to America in the late sixties. There have been changes, too, in voice, style, and technique. An earlier rhetorical energy gave way to a more stripped-down, quieter economy of expression, relying more on image than descriptive elaboration. But while much has changed, weathered perhaps, some themes and preoccupations remain, I think, as ground-notes throughout. They are part of one’s shadow, for better or worse, they move as one’s self moves. The poems here, I hope, speak for themselves. The short prose-form pieces are another way of speaking. The translations are occasional, except for the Juhász poems, which were commissioned by Penguin. With virtually all the translations I’ve needed the help of native speakers. Lastly, and importantly, I owe this book to Michael McGriff, a fine poet and friend. He conceived it, he shaped it and put it together, and his energy, effort, and patience nursed it to publication. I owe him a very great debt of thanks.

David Wevill Austin, Texas September 2009 Editor’s Preface

Toni Morrison has written somewhere that she began her life as a novelist when she made the simple decision to write the books that she wanted to read. I admire this sentiment as both a reader and writer—it’s a warning against listening to the various taste-makers and dictators of culture, and it’s a call to action, an invitation to make it new, a celebration of the individual voice. To this end, the roots of To Build My Shadow a Fire are straightfor- ward. I wanted to read (and wanted to share with others) a book that didn’t exist, so I had to make it myself. When I received David Wevill’s blessing for this endeavor, I proceeded not as a scholar or critic (that is to say, with no formulated aesthetic agenda or tinted biographical lens), but as an avid reader and admirer of the poetry itself. I let my intuition about the work guide me during the editorial process, with David serving as both sounding board and veto holder. That said, assembling a collection like this is not sim- ply the process of compiling the “best” work. A book of poetry (be it an edited collection or an individual volume), essentially, is a unified, sequential work, with each poem being a distinct source of light shining within a pool of light. The editorial challenge is to find the many arcs of the work, and to highlight those arcs with the most invisible of hands, for to cast a shadow or hold up a mirror does a great and potentially dangerous disservice to the writer, the reader, and ultimately, to the art itself. This invisibility act proved complicated when excerpting from the long sequences in Firebreak, Where the Arrow Falls, and Asterisks. I wanted to honor the narrative, thematic, and stylistic threads in each of these works by piecing together key sequential portions that spoke to the overall trajectory of the given piece. Though it is undeniable that the ideal and most contextualized way to enter a poet’s work is to enter it in its entirety and on its own terms, and though it is the nature of a book such as this to be suggestive rather than comprehensive, it is also true that a thoughtful selection of a writer’s work will open as many doors as the reader is willing to step through. Projects like these are never tackled alone, and I have many to thank. Of course, my thanks to David Wevill for entrusting me with such a rare, important, and meaningful undertaking. Thanks to Britta Ameel, Eavan Boland, Carl Adamshick, Michael Dickman, Matthew Dickman, Charles Seluzicki, and Bruce Meyer for offering invaluable support and editorial ad- vice. Thanks to Tony Frazer at Shearsman Books for sending me a copy of Wevill’s obscure chapbook Figure of Eight. I would also like to express my appreciation for Barry Callaghan and Michael Callaghan at Exile Editions Ltd.—both are long-standing champions of Wevill’s poetry and deserve to be recognized for their efforts. Many heartfelt thanks to Nancy Rediger, Barbara Smith-Mandell, and Jim Barnes at Truman State University Press. Without their vision, this book would not exist.

Michael McGriff San Francisco September 2009 Acknowledgments

Works in this volume have been previously published in the following books:

Penguin Modern Poets 4 (Penguin, 1963) Birth of a Shark (Macmillan, 1964) A Christ of the Ice-Floes (Macmillan, 1966) Penguin Modern European Poets: Sándor Weöres and Ferenc Juhász (Penguin, 1970) Firebreak (Macmillan, 1971) Where the Arrow Falls (Macmillan, 1974) Casual Ties (Curbstone Publishing Company, 1983) Other Names for the Heart: New and Selected Poems 1964–1984 (Exile Editions, 1985) Figure of Eight: New Poems and Selected Translations (Exile Editions, 1987) Child Eating Snow (Exile Editions, 1994) Solo With Grazing Deer (Exile Editions, 2001) Asterisks (Exile Editions, 2007) Introduction

Michael McGriff

David Wevill was born a Canadian in Yokohama, Japan, where his family had lived for two generations, in 1935. His family left for Canada before the outbreak of World War II. Wevill grew up in Canada, and moved to England to attend Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated with honors in English and history (M.A.) in 1958. During the 1960s Wevill lived in Lon- don, Burma (where he taught at the University of Mandalay for two years), and Spain. He moved to Texas in 1968, where he joined the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He became a dual citizen (Canada and the United States) in 1994, and taught in the English department at Texas until his retirement in 2007. He continues to reside in Austin. Wevill gained recognition as a promising new voice during his involve- ment with the rich poetry culture surrounding the University of Cambridge in the late 1950s. Four of Wevill’s earliest published poems are found in Poetry from Cambridge: 1958 (Fortune Press, 1958). In addition to Wevill, twenty-one poets comprise Poetry from Cambridge, most notably Sylvia Plath, Robert Wallace, and Ted Hughes. More notoriously, Wevill was asso- ciated with The Group, an unofficial “workshop” collective of young poets in London. Whether by design or by chance, the poems generated by The Group served as a stark contrast to the creative efforts generated by the so- called Movement. The Movement poets were featured in Robert Conquest’s 1956 New Lines anthology (Macmillan) and tended toward a conservative, somewhat neoclassical, and traditionally formal aesthetic. The Group was facilitated by Philip Hobsbaum in 1954, then by Edward Lucie-Smith in 1959. The ranks of The Group included an ever-shifting amalgamation of young poets whose origins were as varied as Pakistan, Australia, Cyprus, and Jamaica. In addition to Wevill, The Group facilitated, to varying de- grees, the creative efforts of Zulfikar Ghose, George MacBeth, Peter Porter, Peter Redgrove, Fleur Adcock, and Nathaniel Tarn. When Hobsbaum left Cambridge to lecture at Queen’s College, Belfast, he organized the so-called Belfast Group. During its tenure, The Belfast Group included, among others, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Ciarán Carson, and Paul Muldoon. In 1963 Edward Lucie-Smith and Philip Hobsbaum edited A Group Anthol- ogy (Oxford University Press), which included five poems by David Wevill, the anthology’s lone North American voice.

Introduction xix England’s early 1960s gave rise to one of the most influential English- language poetry venues in the postwar era, the Penguin Modern Poets series. Eschewing the traditional hardbound single-author volume, Penguin published three authors in each of its Modern Poets titles, all of which were sold as inexpensive pocket-sized paperbacks. From 1962 to 1979, Penguin published eighty-one poets (twenty-seven books) in this format, including Lawrence Durrell, Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, Charles Bu- kowski, John Ashbery, Edwin Muir, Kenneth Koch, and Denise Levertov, as well as several poets featured in A Group Anthology. The fourth title in this series, Penguin Modern Poets 4 (Penguin, 1963), showcased the poetry of David Holbrook, Christopher Middleton, and David Wevill. In this volume, readers first caught a broader glimpse of Wevill’s distinct style, which is marked by a controlled, muscular line, dark and earthy imagery, and a lyr- ical voice that speaks from the empirical world as it leaps toward the realm of the figurative. We can see these traits in the opening and final stanzas of Wevill’s first poem in Penguin Modern Poets 4, “The Two-Colored Eagle.”

The last days wrenched her inward completely. Her beak scraped inner brain, Her skull turned to old rocks and the wine seeped out dry.

......

Now her iron-age furnace heart Hardens too, with October, the dead in our bones. It is a grim place to bring love.

The speaker in these poems, and to a larger extent in the later work, finds himself out in the wilderness, sorting through his desires and fears amid an organic, uncontrollable, and oftentimes violent terrain. In this metaphori- cal territory, the voice wears the mask of the pilgrim, the exile, and the Or- phic figure. One year after the publication of Penguin Modern Poets 4, Wevill pro- duced his first full-length collection, Birth of a Shark (Macmillan, 1964). This book contains the best work in Penguin Modern Poets 4 and an ample selection of new work. Birth of a Shark resonates both tonally and themati- cally with his first publication, continuing the search to create a language for the precarious relationship between death, life, and the elemental. As seen xx Introduction in the following excerpts from the long poem “Fugue for Wind and Rain,” the voice has the capacity to become a synthesis of man and landscape, both of which are acted upon by a sense of darkness, isolation, and danger.

We come into a new time; the heavy-mooned Darkness hangs its orange crater flare Above the sea. My beaches are quiet: not a crab Shuffles to disgorge its load of soft bulk from its outworn Shell and die In patterns on the sand. … ......

We come into a new time, The world and myself: …

......

… In my effort to call them back I make slaves of everything I see: that ditch Where wineskin-fat cactuses gripped The white solid fortress rock, Where red-black beetles fought and tore at each other’s Strung nerves: in the violence of thunder off the hills’ One rainstorm in a month,— In our bodies gored by the flame of July night.

......

This sea has many coasts, And every inch and brown pool Is a fingerprint.

......

Introduction xxi … I look for the change of light, now Over this sea: which tomorrow promises only by small chance To reveal, be re-revealed Through its weak heart of water, my body, my blood.

Birth of a Shark was greeted with critical acclaim in the UK, and quickly went into a second printing. In 1965, Birth of a Shark garnered the Arts Council Book Prize for the best first or second book published in the three previous years (an award shared with Philip Larkin for his collection The Whitsun Weddings), the Richard Hillary Prize, and an Arts Council Poetry Bursary. For Wevill, 1966 marked a meteoric year. His work was showcased in the revised and enlarged edition of A. Alvarez’s seminal anthology, The New Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1966); he published his second full-length collection, A Christ of the Ice-Floes (Macmillan, 1966); he was awarded a second Arts Council Poetry Bursary; and A Christ of the Ice-Floes was run- ner-up for Canada’s Governor General’s Award (which Margaret Atwood won for The Circle Game). In addition to the poetry showcased in The New Poetry, Alvarez’s truculent, finger-pointing introduction to the anthology, “Beyond the Gentility Principle,” helped to make the book both an instant controversy and an instant success (The New Poetry eventually sold over 150,000 copies). In “Beyond the Gentility Principle,” he railed against the decency, politeness, and bourgeois conservatism he found at play in the English poets of the postwar era, particularly the Movement poets:

Of the nine poets to appear in this [New Lines], six, at the time, were university teachers, two librarians, and one a Civil Servant. It was, in short, academic-administrative verse, polite, knowledge- able, efficient, polished, and, in its quiet way, even intelligent. What it had to offer positively was more difficult to describe.

In its first edition, The New Poetry postured itself as an all-English anthology, though it contained the work of American poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman. In short, The New Poetry featured the poets who would define their generation: Donald Davie, Philip Larkin, Michael Hamburger, Chris- topher Middleton, Charles Tomlinson, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, George MacBeth, Ian Hamilton. In its revised and enlarged edition, The New Poetry shed its English-only parameters, adding Sylvia Plath, Anne xxii Introduction Sexton, Peter Porter, and David Wevill to its table of contents. A Christ of the Ice-Floes follows the trajectory of Wevill’s previous work, yet it differs in three ways. The poems in this volume, arguably, are his most distinctly Canadian—not in the sense of nationalism or populism, but in the sense that many of the poems deal directly with details of landscape and place exclusive to the Canada of the author’s adolescence. Secondly, the poems in this collection signal the beginning of Wevill’s experiment with the fragment and poetic line, as seen here in “Either/Or.”

I you witnesses—

the doors between us glass doors through the clothes and skin and the senses’ circuit from event to event are interlocking circles never concentric never the same wound in the same place but a shift in the air like a mouth riding alone through the spaces of rooms: speaking whisper-cautions less than that lip-readings

......

I fret for the future but am at peace in the now and no new thing can blend us or divide us beyond what we are and will be.

Thirdly, this volume marks Wevill’s first explicit engagement with the ethical dilemmas surrounding modernization, mechanization, and the environment,

Introduction xxiii Index of Titles

Symbols A First Drawing, 104 E After the Fair, 254 and Numbers Either/Or, 44 A Legend, 18 , 181 Ethnic Poem II, 169 A Message Too Late, 239 1, 65, 85 Every day I discover, 254 And Language is Everything, 2, 85 Exuberance (Paul Klee), 164 157 3, 86, 193 An Event About to Happen, 4, 87 172 F 5, 87, 193 Answers, 187 Figure of Eight, 141 6, 88 Assia, 157 For Woodwinds, 53 7, 88 At Rideau Falls, 12 Four, 260 8, 66, 89 A Window in London, 171 Four Seasons, 234 9, 90, 194 Fraying-Stocks, 17 10, 67, 90 Frictions, 185 11, 90, 194 B From a Yoruba Poem, 63 12, 92, 195 Baby Upside Down in a Fugue for Wind and Rain, 20 13, 68 Light Snowfall, 161 14, 68 Being Absent, 98 16, 70 Bettelheim, 173 G 17, 196 Beyond, 170 Germinal, 15 19, 197 Birthday, 97 Gold, 213 20, 71 Birth of the Foal, 214 Grace, 123 21, 197 Black Peacock, 240 24, 198 Bones of man, 261 H 26, 72 Happiness, 184 27, 199 C Heat Wave, 175 29, 73 Cante Hondo, 135 Henry the Navigator, 256 32, 78 Catkins, 34 Here, 262 33, 200 Ceremony, 264 Hunger and Hate, 233 36, 200 Child Eating Snow, 161 36 (excerpt), 79 Clean Break, 10 39, 81 I Climbing, 158 41, 82 Impression During an Inter- Cockroach and Star, 26 44, 201 view, 9 Comet-Watchers, 215 45, 202 In Hadrian’s Palace, 261 Construction Site, 46 46, 84 Inktonmi, a Prayer, 136 Conversation, 174 49, 203 In Late June, 174 Interstice, 153 D A Departures, 188 A Beginning, 54 L Diamonds, 42 A Christ of the Ice-Floes, 32 Lament, 60 Dirge, 45 A Church in Bulgaria, 235 Lamp, 178

Index of Titles 267 Landscape, 179 Puddles, 11 The Boy Changed into a Stag Last Settlers, 6 Clamors at the Gate of Last Snow, 35 R Secrets, 221 Late Sonnet V, 126 The Circle, 27 Railroad Tracks, House for Love-Stones, 31 The Conquest, 135 Sale and Clouds, 183 The Crèche, 12 Redtails, 125 The Dark Night, 258 M Rincón for Paco the Fool, The Flower of Silence, 235 Mary, 217 121 Then There Are Fish, 215 Meditation On a Pine-Cone, Rincón for the Face in Ho- The Rainbow-Colored 36 tels, 122 Whale, 242 Memorial II, 57 Ring of Bone, 102 The Text, 101 Monsoon, 6 Rune, 179 The Tower of Rezi, 217 My Father Sleeps, 3 The Two-Colored Eagle, 3 S The Unapproachable, 124 N Sabi, 178 The Venturers, 7 Namelessness, 168 Scavenging, 128 They That Hunt You, 95 Neutrons, 134 Self-Portrait at Ten, 39 Third Time Lucky, 22 Night Bus South, 170 Separation, 8 Three, 55 Nocturnes, 56 Separation in the Evening Thursday, Day of Supersti- November Elegy, 219 (Paul Klee, 1922), 165 tion, 246 Shallots, 126 Tiger Tiger, 103 O Sickness, 61 Time Out, 189 Silver, 213 October, 60 Two Riders, 28 Snow Country, 129 Ode, 256 Solo With Grazing Deer, 190 Old Legends, 168 V Spain, 121 On a Book Abandoned on a Vigil, 171 Spain and Kafka, 155 Journey, 257 Visit of the Son, 40 Spiders, 4 Other Names for the Heart, Visitors, 128 Stump, 182 132 Summer Morning, 175 Sunlight Through Blinds, W P Four O’clock, Facing Wherever Men Have Been, Palace of Piero Della Franc- West, 186 47 esca, 263 Sun within, 265 Wild Eyes, 185 Paracentric, 137 Wine-Cask, 19 Paris, 1957, 166 T Winter Homecoming, 33 Patterns Leaves Make, 153 Talking, 100 Poem, 15, 51 Taos, 52 X Poem Depending on Dashes, Telephone, 99 X , 58 166 4 Texas Spring, 52 Poem for Octavio Paz, 262 The Big List, 96 Polonaise, 127 Y The Birth of a Shark, 22 Premonition, 140 Your beauty hurts, 264 The Black Ox’s Curved Back, Proof of How it Should 26 Look, 154

268 Index of Titles Index of First Lines

A E A baby hung in the wind, 169 Every day I discover, 254 A Citroen Deux Chevaux, 166 Every man, 42 A hand raised, 200 All winter the thudding sparrows came and F went, 10 Fell into a false sleep—woke up, 58 Always the search for a form, 125 First this house, 54 A man running on a background of wind, 185 Forever confusing smoke with weeds, 215 A prayer before a journey, 79 Frost a little like Yeats, 141 As I danced along the tightrope, 164 As I grow older, 68 As May was opening the rosebuds, 214 H A snake emptied itself into the grass., 6 Headlights in the mirror on a lonely road, 52 “As one grows older one becomes, 137 He asks each sunrise, 73 As people dreamed, 68 Here, 262 At a time when people still talk about the Here, there, memory fails, 201 heart, 100 Here we go, laughing, 102 At eighty-two her great artery, 135 Hills become trees, 52 At night or just before dawn, 66 How exactly the paler shadows of the, 155 autumn in spring, 72 Autumn is gone. The leaves have turned to I mold, 234 I, 44 A year, 51 I am alone in body, 15 I am drawn to bèi, the Chinese cowrie radical, B 181 Between midnight and daybreak, 92 I am tall as this ruined tower, 17 Bones of man, 261 I came from near Beja, 257 Both will lose face. The one, 9 I cannot comfortably gaze at standing water, Brown before the first big spring rain, 104 11 But for the tapping of a hammer on wood, 174 I feel my rust beginning., 178 But here with winter about to begin, 166 If I am to stay where you put me, 157 By now after all these years, 168 If it is the nature of women, 200 If there were a god I’d deny him, 233 C If you grunt you will be understood, 121 I had finished washing up, 173 Cottonmouth, 70 I have built you, 85, 90 I have known three healers, 55 D I have set plaster to catch a foot, 185 Dance is the gesture, 264 I have this habit of talking to you, 174 Deep as it appears to have gone, 153 I imagined silence was a way of speaking, 123 Dreams: radical doors, 194 I lean into the crowd and ask, 135

Index of First Lines 269 I might have imagined the voices singing, 170 North wind at stalemate with the sun. Acorns, In autumn the silences grow loud, 179 121 I noticed in the mountains this time, seven Not Navajo, 71 years later, 158 Not to, 203 In the wilderness she, 161 Now your grave is sinking, 242 I pull the blankets close, 7 I read your poems again, my friend, 239 O I see a face in the stone, 82 On a dark night, 258 I sit here in the Rezi tower, 217 One blind-calm summer night, 215 It is liveliest to be still, 90 One by one they go, 199 It is quiet here, 87 One has been there and one has not, 101 It is these nights when, 175 One of a thousand dust-blown, touchy, 34 It was so long, 88 On his throne among the shining spheres, 256 It was taken in the late afternoon, 172 On the third day it is hardest, on the third, 246 I visited your grave, 57 Out there, rain telling the trees, 189 I walk backward into the time it takes to become my body, 97 I was walking alone uphill, 171 P Points, angles, hollows, lines, all, 240 J Jetties suck, suck, 8 Q Juniper you stand in the west wind, 81 Quiet as stones, but, 86

K R Kawabata talked about, 129 Round and round, 85

L S Like a little cow swollen with calf, 217 She chose, 60 Loose, tethered loose, 28 She dreamt, 126 She kicks off her jeweled sandals, 140 M She left us while the light was bad, 183 Sometimes, 87 Madrid in the rain. Every day, 122 Subject to object: sun wind rain, 202 Man and geometry, 260 Sun within, 265 Mother’s son, father’s son, 190 Muddling up the wooden stairs one night, in my socks, 4 T My mind hunts in circles, sober, ruthless and The adams and eves are in the gallery, 153 cold, 219 The airfield stretches its cantilever wings, 33 The animal that thought itself a tiger, 103 N The burnt-out house we are always, 182 The cold bottom pond, 35 Night of south winds! night of the large few The companions of Red Horn return to their stars!, 170 homes, 136 No one goes to the park in winter, 184 The crèche of faces, 12

270 Index of First Lines The cure as with a flower is to water the root, To see it all fresh, 90 124 To the trees at the waterline—, 32 The dry wind ticks in the leaves, 53 Tu Fu: “How will poems, 197 The flower of silence fades to grief’s huge Twice I called, and twice, 22 funeral leaves, 235 Two arrows point, 165 The knife-cut knuckle, 197 Two branches, 193 The lake’s banked fires, 56 The last days wrenched her inward completely, U 3 Under the wind there is a place where you The lifesnake uncoils, 193 can hide, 179 The light-beast rose early, 63 The mother called to her own son, 221 Then comes the screaming dog, 78 V The ones we know and recognize, 161 Village, hills, blue sea, 198 The other day a scrap of paper crawled in my Virtually nothing is whole. I imitate myself in direction, 96 the mirror, 126 The pine-cone’s whorled, 36 There is no equality among those, 67 W The sea rises at night, 26 Wastes grow; you lean into the sun, 15 These elegies, black dreams, 84 We asked for proof, 154 The sinewy nerves of a cabbage now, 18 We come home in the sense, 195 The slow work-gang, 46 We come into a new time; the heavy-mooned, The spider hasn’t dreamed about his, 27 20 The three-day blow, 31 We drink the rain, 127 The tideless Ottawa is small, 12 We find our selves, 89 The top of your head is still open, 65 What had become of the young shark?, 22 The train all night dappling lights in the edge What is blacker than a black horse, 19 of our eyes, 45 What is the time of day, 187 The traveler stands in the freezing cold, 213 When the wind blows, 134 The whipped horse was lame. We’d cycled to When your eye, 88 town, 39 Where I am not is what begins to happen, 98 The woman touches her bun, 213 Where is there true strength, 26 They hung, 188 Where the conjunction is, 262 They scattered the fires, 196 Where there were houses there is grass, 128 They that hunt you know two things about Where the wind goes it breathes, 168 you, 95 Wherever men have been, this, 47 They wander down the road, 254 While I was dreaming inside my flame, 178 This feebleness, this trembling, 132 Who brought from the snow-wrecked, 3 This is a temple of absolute love, 261 Whoever comes stepping through the frame, This is the address. The number is unknown, 186 40 Whoever lived in this house commanded the This mark refers you to, 194 valley, 6 This philosopher I knew, his, 157 Who was that you saw walk past, 171 This place is sacred. Grace, here, 263 Winter vines running like flames, 128 To be great you must be whole. Don’t, 256 Wreathed into the earth, a stone coffin, this Too early yet to tell what the day will bring, 99 church, 235

Index of First Lines 271 Y You dream about circuses, the clown, the tightrope walker, 60 You must get up as early as the light, 175 Your beauty hurts, 264 You turn, 61

272 Index of First Lines