77.

He considered his poems

secrets, as if caught

in some act too terrible

more shameful than sweat

on naked lesh, askance

in the garden embowered.

No one in his clan or town

wrote or read lines from nature

sublimated desire in the measure

of words. From the sea where he stood

his round face, bearded, his eyes

peering from horn-rims, he descanted

as though someone else, on love and death

and how that ate the theme of blood and bone

how he reached for something

beyond his nose, past the prose

and clatter of each day and the night

he feared and loved to the end.