Like Music To Roses

Your essential friends in chains

of hot bare franting sweating light

and behind voided city shadows

with ugly bitter black blood:

Do you think you want no trudging part 

together with them

leaving their needs and loves never watered

even slight?

Are you not often happy alone

beneath slackened, fortunate white summer moons

on shiny still lakes of love?

Or merely under weak, mournful dreams and lies

none for beauty’s use—none for beauty’s use?

Tell time and the sky and the sun

not of these sad leanings . . . selfish meanings—

or they will be gone from you,

blowing but one last rusty rain

after two briney raw lustless leg-ironed storms

over all our beds!

Put them by the place

you had there

always played—

Above such dark life.

Then watch sweet power sing to you

like music will to roses,

So that they too know

the often kind wind

whispers all answers of why

to a tended garden.