winter’s morning

      What is this love to you? – no more

       than a web woven of parting and absence,

       a cradle the frost spins for evanescence

       and fixes at three trembling points or four

       between reed and reed at the lake's brink

        on a winter's morning? Or do you see

        us two linked only by fragile tracery

        of long-wintered beeches? Or think

        we run ripples on the lake?

Patternings

       as frail as these have a place in nature, 

       vanishing always between past and future, 

       and in love too is a place for yearnings

       and the torture of wind in the web and high

       mockery of leafless twigs. 

But where am I? 

O come and find me where the rock gives birth

in the deep luxurious hollows of the earth

and find me in the boles of mighty trees. 

Find me and love me in the mosses of my ease

where lusty roots and limbs timelessly  writhe, 

where our long summer's buried but alive.