[New-Poetry] apologies

[Anny Ballardini]

I just wanted to send Mark Levine's poem 
8. Poem From Last Year
  Willow

  Okay, willow, breathe on me
  from the sunless opening in you-
  crescent of gouges and breezes-slope
  on which beetles stumble and are
  flushed out-

  Traffic, human traffic with its rinse
  of promises and pauses is coming
  for keeps.
  And look there goes a swallow transplanting soil.
  Me (let me think it)
  I can sit on this bench longer than nature
  and not know or crave a thing
  about this bench, bottle cap dented into its plank

  and initials scratched beside it, beside
  the point: two raw letters forward to back just
  as rare as any combination.
  And now the date, plume of digits, daily
  statistic.

  This is behavior, willow, this
  drone, it accompanied you once
  in your grove of which
  you have a memory-a lush one-don't you?
  Was there no breath of you there?

  I crossed the arc of your silhouette and lapped
  your leaves' signature.
  Things grew from you
  beneath you in the patched grass
  and not far away sat a man on
  a bench.

  You take it in or you don't.
  You hide the sky or else.
  Things lived in you.
  You, stranger.


  Mark Levine 
  The Wilds
  University of California Press
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