Daphne

Poet, that fear of staying put,
your legs and arms arrested, night-
mare style (‘Her feet but now so swift
were anchored fast / in numb stiff
roots’); of, worst, the tongue
gone wooden in the mouth, its language
leafing, helpless, out, into a silent
spring; is yours, not mine. I
evade your grasp with his. I run
not out of utterance, but into it.

The quoted lines are from A.D. Melville’s translation of the
Metamorphoses (Oxford University Press, 1986).




Heartwood

Within the least growth ring inscribed
within the other, greater rings,
...