Four Poems

BEDE'S COPYIST

I have no proper name, yet his is tall
on Europe's stones and in the candleflukes
whose culture briefly held a sparrow's brawl
in a crowned head. We set it down in books,
a lettered Latin: that bird; this birth; that stall.
    There were no mistakes.

Outside, the snow almost obscures the park,
our wooden Christ's obliterated face.
Inside, with all the negligence of grace
his habit falls across my page's mark.
Again we work between space and space -
    and both are dark.

HERE

Whatever I have said or done has been
a slow respect. Look, then, at where I live:
the closed sky teeming with electric rain;
the bulb-stems splitting their each sleeve;
...