I.

I want to strip my life clean, reduce my stuff
to bare essentials—a tree in winter
at winter’s end, a cliff above a white sea.

Make that a white cliff, swallows wheeling,
and let the high priest of morning
sing up the sun.

Make it Millay’s West Country sun
with her lark in air and that song
clean through me

and Millay’s West Country cry—
What have I done with what was dearest to me?
It is not here.

II.

Everyone gets a key to the garden,
a stone seat big enough for one
worn smooth by longing.

III.

Called to the window by petals leaping,
morning breeze. No words
soft enough to say
how this delicate infusion,

a teaspoon of violet dissolved
in an empty sky,
alters the intake of breath.

I bow my head
and look into my heart:

open door
patch of sky
and the wind moves through.